[NBLUG/talk] file backup and encryption question

Ken McGlothlen mcglk at artlogix.com
Fri Apr 18 15:21:34 PDT 2008


Er, Sean?  Are you talking about just encrypting files during transmission,
or do you actually want them encrypted when they're stored on the receiving
end.

If it's the former, your work is done already:  scp uses an encrypted channel
to send the files.

If it's the latter, you're probably going to have to use find combined with
gpg (or something similar) to encrypt the files into a parallel directory tree,
and then send that via scp to your backup machine.

The reason I'm suggesting making a parallel directory tree rather than "on-
the-fly" encryption is because you don't want to have to open 200 scp
connections to transfer 200 files.  Far better to use scp's -r option to
transfer the entire tree with a single connection.

Of course, all this assumes that that's really the way you want to back up
your files.  If you have the option, Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/) supports
encrypted backup volumes (you can read about this a little here:
http://blog.fupps.com/2007/05/17/encrypting-bacula-backups/ ).  That would
probably be a lot easier in the long run.

---Ken



More information about the talk mailing list