Ask HN: Remote encrypted backup recommendation?

4 points by StavrosK ↗ HN
Hey everyone,

I've been researching my backup requirements lately, and my requirements are:

* Encrypted, trusted (this implies open source) backups.

* Able to backup to a remote server. Google Drive is a plus.

* Not terribly bandwidth intensive.

* Not terribly expensive, as I'm backing up non-critical photos which are already on RAID and local backups anyway.

I'm currently using SpiderOak, but I don't like the fact that it's closed source. I experimented with Duplicity, but it turns out that it requires me to reupload my entire 50 GB collection every month or so, as it's good sense to have full backups every so often.

The problem is that, even though I require encryption, it shouldn't roll all files into a huge ball of mud, as that will need reuploading every once in a while, it's not easy to sync, etc.

Basically, the ideal for me would be something like Duplicity with per-file encryption, or rdiff-backup with encryption. Is there something that would fit the bill, or would I have to build it myself?

12 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] thread
You didn't mention your operating system.

I use EncFS and my preferred syncing service, the [1] tutorial was helpful for me.

[1] - http://www.howtogeek.com/121737/how-to-encrypt-cloud-storage...

Sorry, Linux. I use EncFS already over Dropbox (as pretty much the only way to use Dropbox), but I don't want to EncFS my entire drive just for backups, it seems like something that should be handled on the tool itself. I'm thinking of writing a thin layer over Duplicity's backends that will EncFS-style encrypt files and store them on the various services.
(comment deleted)
IIRC, EncFS has this option where you can use it backwards. That is you mount a normal file system say /foo to /bar and then /bar contains the EncFS encrypted files. This might be an option.
This is pretty much exactly what I needed. You win this QA, thank you!
The only encrypted backup solution I've ever recommended is Tarsnap.
Yeah, it sounds like that's the one to use. Unfortunately, it's around 10 times more expensive than Google Drive, so hardly worth it for non-critical data...
Spider Oak?

Bittorrent Sync?

As I said in the description, they're both closed source, which isn't great. BT Sync looks great for syncing, but not backups...