Are you one of the 20 million people who use Ubuntu Linux every day? If so, you might truly enjoy this solution for backup and/or file archiving…
https://one.ubuntu.com/services/
The same Brigada reader wrote, “You can do the same thing with Dropbox. Just get a good software package to manage the backup. I wrote my own (that uploads to the Ubuntu cloud), but there are plenty of available alternatives. My software package does this:
1) Compress home directory (from ~60 gigs to 3 gigs)
2) Encrypt compressed files
3) Compare encrypted, compressed files with those in the cloud directory
4) Update any that don’t match
The whole process takes ~2 minutes each night, then I’m always backed up and I never have to think about it. I actually set it to back up to the Ubuntu cloud and Dropbox, that way I always have two copies. The encryption is virtually unbreakable without my key.” Cool. You can probably do that in your spare time too, right? (Thanks for the tip, Chris!)
So Chris, tell us how you wrote your backup process…
He’s a very busy guy. No promises. But I’ll ask. :-)
Hey Andrew,
I went a fairly circuitous route, more out of pleasure and curiosity than necessity. But the essentials are as follows.
First, I used a dictionary based compression algorithm to compress the files I’m backing up, then I used propagating cipher-block chaining to encrypt the files. Then I write those files to a directory in Dropbox/Ubuntu One. It’s pretty straightforward, I implemented everything in C or Python. Then I wrote a shell script to backup once per day.
It was pretty straightforward, I mainly pieced things together from old psets and made some simple edits. And it’s wholly unnecessary; a lot of the open source stuff does what I do better than how I do it. But it was fun, and I learned some things.
Chris, thanks for taking time to explain.
Sounds totally straightforward, I’m sure, to anybody that knows dictionary-based algorithms, cipher-blocks, Ubuntu, C, Python, shell scripts, and psets.
Simple. :-)
:-)