Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Secure remote backup

[Neil Bothwick]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006 11:40:46 +0100, Dan Johansson wrote:

> > I use a combination of sshfs and encfs to keep my backups encrypted at
> > Strongspace. You can use this with any online backup or web hosting
> > services as long as they allow ssh file transfers (you don't need ssh
> > login).
>
> This sounds like an interesting approach, would you mind sharing some
> more details about your setup/configuration?

Initially I tried mounting the remote directory using sshfs and then
creating an encfs mount on it. however, this ran exceptionally slowly so
I tool a different approach.

I creating a local encfs mount with
encfs /path/to/data-enc /path/to/data-plain

Then used rsync to backup the required directories to /path/to/data-plain
which left encrypted versions of them in /path/to/data-enc. Then I simply
used rsync to sync the encrypted directory to the remote backup server.
Each backup run now consists of

encfs /path/to/data-enc /path/to/data-plain
rsync /src/dir /path/to/data-plain
rsync -a /path/to/data-enc/ user@backup-server:/backups/
fusermount -u /path/to/data-plain

This is done via cron each night.

I can access individual files from the encrypted backup with

sshfs -o idmap=user user@backup-server:/backups /path/to/data-enc
encfs user@backup-server:/backups /path/to/data-plain

I also needed to put my SSH public key in .ssh/authorized_keys to avoid
giving passwords every time the backup ran.

The sshfs and encfs documentation is quite good, but feel free to ask if
you need any more info.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it.