LinuxGeex.Myhosting.Info: Painless Cloud Storage
Articles Painless Encrypted Cloud Storage May 12th 2011

Ever lost data? I've suffered disk failures twice and learned my lesson. Now I have a cloud FTP service which runs me about $100 per year, and a USB RAID1 (Western Digital WorldBook) which was $300ish when I got it, now a fair bit less expensive. I use both rsync and duplicity: rsync creates a mirror; duplicity creates a revision history. I have them on crons, you may want to do something else.

# To install the software:

sudo apt-get install rsync duplicity curlftpfs encfs

# To mount the mirror:

curlftpfs -s -o no_verify_peer,no_verify_hostname,transform_symlinks example.com /mnt/cloud encfs -S /mnt/cloud/crypt /mnt/cloud_crypt <~/.cloud_pass

# To sync the cloud mirror (I've long ago forgotten what these flags do!):

rsync --inplace --progress -hrSlptgoD /home/user /mnt/cloud_crypt/ # And to a USB external harddrive: rsync --inplace --progress -hrSlptgoD /home/user /media/backup_volume/

# To backup with duplicity: (I don't keep a local copy of this, you might want to?)

PASSPHRASE="your_pass_phrase" FTP_PASSWORD=cloud_ftp_password duplicity --include /home/user ftp://cloud_ftp_user@cloud_server.com/backup/user

** Note that the rsync mirror is encrypted in transit and storage by the encryptfs mount, but you can still access them transparently from the mountpoint /mnt/cloud_crypt. The duplicity data is encrypted in core and sent over plain old insecure FTP. I wasn't happy that my cloud storage supplier didn't provide either SFTP or FTPS, this is the next best thing. If you can use a secure server, you may want to turn off dupicity's encryption for performance reasons if you are on a very fast uplink (not cable or A/DSL)

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