On 11/14/18, Jonathan Dowland <j...@debian.org> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 10:01:38AM -0500, Lee wrote: >>What I've been using on windows is truecrypt to encrypt the drive and >>1) unison + gui frontend to do a quick backup of selected files & 2) a >>bat file that calls xcopy to copy files with the archive flag set to >>YYMMDD/ on an encrypted drive (ie. an incremental backup; I do a full >>backup every few months) > > Luckily, you can use almost the exact same tools for achieving the same > on Debian. > > There are a few choices for the encryption tool you use; I suggest using > "cryptsetup", especially over a few of the alternatives (encfs, ecryptfs) > but the tooling you use to achieve this will depend upon what desktop > environment (if any) you are using.
Well that's .. surprising. I went with xfce because it's supposed to be 'lightweight' and I'm trying debian on an old laptop. If I go with something other than xfce is it just mounting & unlocking the external drive that changes or is there more? > I know that GNOME 3 (what I'm using) can detect and mount LUKS-encrypted > disks when they are attached to my machine. What I'm not sure about is > whether it can be used to create those in the first place. Although I > guess that's a one-time operation (per external USB), so not too bad to > do it via command-line tools. See man cryptsetup(1) > <https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/cryptsetup-bin/cryptsetup.8.en.html> Wow! A lot of good info there that's going to take me a while to digest - thank you. > Once you've got the encrypted disk set up, you could use unison > similarly to how you are on Windows. You'd need to re-implement the > batch file if you wanted exactly the same behaviour for that, and > there's no direct analogue of the archive bit that I can think of, so > marking/identifying files is one part of the puzzle; No problem re-implementing the batch file as a script :) & I've got unison setup to compare the files to see if the backup is current or not, so the archive bit doesn't come into play there. > I'd recommend > taking a look at rsync for performing the copy. I've used rsync at work. It was fast & good enuf for keeping my files on different machines consistent but I never figured out how to sync everything except <some list of files/directories> eg. backing up ~/.cache seems like a waste of time & disk space. > Or throw it all out and use something like rdiff-backup and just back up > everything… Which can take a long time & tends to back up way more than I want. Or is there a way to give it a list of files & directories to ignore? That was the main reason I liked unison - it's easy to create a list of files/directories to ignore. Thanks Lee
