| repak shawahb | |||||
| I suppose I'll just have to waterboard myself | |||||
blogroll |
Sun, 16 Mar 2008
can you back it up? no, no, that box... back it up
After a hard drive crash scare on proton (my colo machine) earlier this week (no data lost, fortunately!), I decided it was time to get serious about regular backups. I did a bit of research and initially settled on Bacula, but because of licensing issues the Debian packages do not link to OpenSSL. This means that I can't encrypt even the handshaking, let alone the data transfer, between client (proton) and backup server (positron). After a little more searching, I found BoxBackup, a solution geared towards backing up across a WAN. It uses SSL/TLS authentication: the server has a signing key and clients must generate keys and then have them signed with the server key before they can connect. On top of that, each client has another key it uses to encrypt the data it stores on the backup server so that it's transmitted and stored securely, and clients can be sure that their data is secure even from the backup server's admins. Setup was a breeze (somewhat simpler than Bacula, though neither is particularly difficult), and while the initial 1.6Gb of data was somewhat unpleasant to transfer over my DSL connection, I expect that the incremental change data should not unduly load my network connection. Now go set up your backup server already. [ permalink | 2 comments ] |
||||