I’ve recently decided to find a different solution for my offsite backups. For years, I’ve had a server in a co-lo facility — but I’ve realized that I don’t really need it much except for offsite backups. Factoring in the monthly costs to the colo facility, plus the time I should be spending maintaining the server to current patch levels, options such as Amazon S3 and Google Drive look rather competitive. However, there’s the question of what sort of software to use… Some basic requirements:
- Compatible with FreeBSD.
- Encryption.
- Reasonably efficient incremental backup functionality.
Googling around, there’s s3rsync which has been around for quite awhile. There’s also a package that I remember from my past, Amanda – we used to use this at UMBC — and it seems to have some support now for S3 storage! However, I remember Amanda being reasonably complicated to deal with. Plus, it doesn’t seem to have support for Google Drive yet.
However, the other day I ran across Duplicity, which seems to be all that and a bag of kittens. Has backends for your popular cloud storage providers, encrypts your data via GnuPG.
Speaking of Google Drive — it’s not that I’m shilling for my employer — unlike Amazon we don’t seem to charge for upload/download bandwidth — and it’s price competitive — and I already pay for Google Apps for Business. So I think I’ll give that a try.
Any other ideas?
Take a look at tarsnap. The author used to be FreeBSD’s security officer.