JP Vossen on 1 Dec 2009 15:05:17 -0800


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[PLUG] Self-hosted online backups?


As is probably the case for a lot of us, I control Linux servers in 
various locations (e.g, my house, my Mom's house).  I want to set up a 
self-hosted online backup service and copy Mom's data to my house and my 
data to her house.  I want the data to be compressed, encrypted (both in 
transit and at rest), have multiple copes/versions 
(daily/weekly/monthly) and to be disk and bandwidth efficient.

Obviously, I could script something using tar, GPG, rsync, and/or other 
tools, but I can't be the only person out there who wants this, and why 
reinvent the wheel?

I've considered rsync.net which sounds really cool, and I was just 
reading about tarsnap.com.  Tarsnap does exactly what I want, except it 
uses a pay-for hosted back-end (AWS).  While neither of them is 
expensive, I'd prefer not to use "the cloud" for various reasons 
including the fact that I'm paranoid, cheap and sometimes a 
control-freak. :-)  I could possibly modify the tarsnip code to work the 
way I want, but that is precluded by the ToS 
(http://www.tarsnap.com/legal.html).  I think the tarsnip setup is 
brilliant on several levels, it's just not what I personally want.

One really simple solution is to just create a local compressed tarball, 
then encrypt that, then rsync it.  But that's crappy because it needs 
2-3x local disk space, depending on how the encryption works the file 
may change so much that rsync is no use, it does not allow 
space-efficient versions, and probably other things I'm forgetting.

My data includes ~20G of pictures and that will only grow, and a mix of 
other static and dynamic data including revision control systems, 
documents and DB files.  Actually, I could get up to a bit under 200G if 
I was really sloppy about what I back up.  So the local 2-3x disk space 
and I/O is non-trivial, and even cheap storage and bandwidth would start 
to add up.

If I have to roll my own, I can and will--eventually.  Meanwhile does 
anyone know of anything that I can self-host without a lot of DIY?

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
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