encrypted backup

[Ylan Segal]

Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> I need to back up a few systems to untrusted hosts.  So I would like to
> have the remote contents encrypted.  But because the remote host is
> untrusted, I can't do the encryption on the remote host.  I'm currently
> using http://rsnapshot.org/ for local backups (works very nice by the
> way) but the encryption issue is a very important one.
> 
> If I need to roll my own solution, what comes to mind is:
> 
> 1) Building an copy of all my files via rsync, decrypting with gpg and
> then using rsnapshot to back up to the remote machine

This would definitely work, and your script will be fairly simple (3 or
4 commands),

If the transfer volume is too big and you need to minimize because of
bandwidth issues, it might be better [1] if you use encfs. It encrypts
on a file by file basis, so you can use rsync directly on the files, so
only the changes files would be transfered. Relatively easy to setup
(but probably more than gpg, which you seem to be already familiar with):

http://arg0.net/wiki/encfs/intro2

[1] I don't know enough about rsync to tell if it would be more
efficient or not.

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Ylan

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