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So about that off-site encrypted backup idea ..

28 September 2012 21:50

I'm just back from having spent a week in Helsinki. Despite some minor irritations (the light-switches were always too damn low) it was a lovely trip.

There is a lot to be said for a place, and a culture, where shrugging and grunting counts as communication.

Now I'm back, catching up on things, and mostly plotting and planning how to handle my backups going forward.

Filesystem backups I generally take using backup2l, creating local incremental backup archives then shipping them offsite using rsync. For my personal stuff I have a bunch of space on a number of hosts and I just use rsync to literally copy my ~/Images, ~/Videos, etc..

In the near future I'm going to have access to a backup server which will run rsync, and pretty much nothing else. I want to decide how to archive my content to that - securely.

The biggest issue is that my images (.CR2 + .JPG) will want to be encrypted remotely, but not locally. So I guess if I re-encrypt transient copies and rsync them I'll end up having to send "full" changes each time I rsync. Clearly that will waste bandwidth.

So my alternatives are to use incrementals, as I do elsewhere, then GPG-encrypt the tar files that are produced - simple to do with backup2l - and us rsync. That seems like the best plan, but requires that I have more space available locally since :

  • I need the local .tar files.
  • I then need to .tar.gz.asc/.tar.gz.gpg files too.

I guess I will ponder. It isn't horrific to require local duplication, but it strikes me as something I'd rather avoid - especially given that we're talking about rsync from a home-broadband which will take weeks at best for the initial copy.

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