On 24/05/05 13:58:02, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
I admit that this is a pretty generic idea... but I hope no-one sees
harm in me asking about it here... I plan to do this with gentoo...
so if someone else has had a similar plan... maybe they could offer
me the benefit of their wisdom :-)
Assumptions:
1. There are two Linux Hosts connected to the internet by ADSL
(512/256Kbps) and that for, say, 6 hours each night this bandwidth is
mostly unused.
2. Each Linux Host has under 1GB of "current" files - and under
100Mb of this changes each day on each host.
3. The (different) administrators of each host do not want to
take responsibility for keeping the others' data secret, and neither
wants the responsibility of having access to the other's files.
4. A daily backup is desired by the administrator of each host.
I've been trialling a similar project myself at work recently. At the
moment I have it working to one remote site, and - if I can get some
boxes to act as backup hosts - I'm planning to roll it out to keep a
backup of all of our sites at each site, which will give us 3 offsite
copies of each site's data files. Our hosts are a mixture of SuSE,
WinNT and WinXP, but all the packages I've used are in portage (the
Windows hosts use Cygwin) - in fact, I wouldn't have thought of it if I
wasn't a Gentoo user, and I'm going to use Gentoo if I do start rolling
out to dedicated backup hosts.
We'd already set up a VPN over ADSL to the one remote site that didn't
already have a private data link, using net-misc/vtun. The backups are
then done using rsync over the tunnelled connection, which makes sure
that only changes are transmitted. In practice, running over a 256
kbit connection, we can update the daily changes to a 128Mbyte file in
about 30 seconds.
This solution doesn't cover encryption of the on-disk backup, but vtun
does encrypt the data passing over the VPN, and also lets you limit the
bandwidth used by the VPN tunnel. Backup encryption could always be
handled by an encrypted loopback FS on the backup host, I guess. It
also doesn't give you any management of backup disk size. Hopefully
it's a good starting point for you to think about, though.
--
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