[gentoo-user] Off-site data backup

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I have a couple of customers for whom I've configured Samba running  
on Linux as their file-servers. We want to do off-site back-up & I  
like the idea of http://www.rsync.net/ which I read as recommended by  
a user here or on Slashdot some considerable time ago.

However I'm not clear on the best way to secure our data when storing  
it on their servers - it's great to be able to use an open-source /  
open-standards protocol such as SSH when transferring data, but this  
does not protect it in the event that the off-site servers are  
compromised. I am sure this isn't likely to happen but still it's  
something we must consider.

It seems to me that we can stuff all our data in a tarball & encrypt  
it using PGP or similar (probably a symmetric algorithm (??) rather  
than PGP, but you get the idea) but that would seem to prevent  
incremental back-ups - using conventional back-up tools the single  
encrypted tarball will be seen to have changed each night and so will  
require completely uploading. Since our data could easily comprise  
several gigs this is clearly unwieldy, and encrypting thousands of  
single files and storing them remotely would seem to me to be clumsy  
also.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, please?

I have read of zsync which allows only the changes in a large single  
file to be propagated but I'm not really sure if it's suitable for  
these purposes.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Stroller.
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