> > I just tried printing the key on paper. I scanned the paper with my > Fujitsu scansnap at max resolution. Then converted the resulting PDF to > a jpg with ImageMagick. Then OCR'd it with tesseract. No joy. OCR is > just not good enough.
OCR success depends a lot on the font used to print the text being recognized. Have you tried different fonts, in particular OCR fonts? There are some free to download at https://www.wfonts.com/search?kwd=ocr (and probably elsewhere), might be worthwhile to print the key using one of those and seeing if recognition improves. Brian On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 10:38 AM jerry <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > Been using tarsnap for a while. In addition to my local backups, I > do a tarsnap of all my business and personal data once a week. > > The other night, I was at a computer club zoom. A presentation was > given on computer security. One really scary thing - ransomware. A > trojan encrypts all your files, and demands money to decrypt them. And > it encrypts EVERYTHING that your Windows computer has access to, > including samba shares. > > Now, I'm pretty good at not loading trojans, but my family....less > so. > The presenter ameliorates his risk every Saturday... He hooks up a NAS > box, backs > up everything, and then disconnects it for the week. I'm not fond of > manual stuff, because sooner or later I fail to do it. "Know > thyself..." > > With a complete tarsnap backup, I could restore everything... but the > big bad trojan might have encrypted the filesystem with my tarsnap key! > Even though it's not a Samba share, and the directory is only readable > by root, and the file is only readable/writable by root. Actually, why > should it be writable at all? I'd never change it. "sudo chmod u-w > tarsnap.key". > > Anyway, in that situation, the tarsnap key becomes VERY valuable. I > suppose I could stick it on some encrypted media and keep it somewhere > else. Friend's house? What if my house burns down? A disk in the fire > safe would probably get fried, but what about a piece of paper? > > I just tried printing the key on paper. I scanned the paper with my > Fujitsu scansnap at max resolution. Then converted the resulting PDF to > a jpg with ImageMagick. Then OCR'd it with tesseract. No joy. OCR is > just not good enough. > Letters "l" get changed to numbers "1", extra letters appear here & > there.... Just not gonna work. > > Ideas? Right now, I'm experimenting with printed barcodes. > > - Jerry Kaidor >
