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I was sent over here by the super user guys, because my question is better suited here.

I have that policy that I leave no data unencrypted, so I am looking for a program or suite of scripts that lets me backup directly into an encrypted container. To be useful it should do the following:

  • Automated backup to a local or/and remote encrypted target storage
  • Incremental backup
  • Automated mounting/unmounting of said storage or provide hooks to insert instructions to do so
  • Automatic rotation, so I can store monthly backups of site
  • Run on linux and has to be maintained
  • Prompt the user to attach the storage device if it is missing
  • Must not dependent on a service provider

Bonus points if:

  • it has a GUI for status information and simple operation like postpone/pause
  • it integrates with PAM/keyrings so the user does not need to provide the password every time the backup starts
  • it is open source or open source friendly

I started to hack something together myself but then this feeling crept up on me that I am reinventing the wheel and I am just too stupid to find the proper solution. Does anyone have a recommendation?

What I already looked at:

  • fwbackup -> no encryption
  • simple backup solution -> no encryption
  • bacula -> has encryption but way too complicated for only 5 machines

Thank you for all the tips

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i'm not 100% sure if it hits all your requirement but Déjà Dup is definitively worth a look:

  • it uses duplicity/rsync as backend
  • use local, external or network-storage (ssh, ftp, WebDAV, smb, etc.)
  • scheduled backups (more flexible settings via dconf/gsettings)
  • optional encryption via symmetric gpg and integrates with keyring
  • notifies via libnotify when a backup is pending but target is missing
  • it works unattached but integrates with several DE-panels for information, status, pause, stop/skip, etc.

deja-dup is for sure open source and therefor in most major distributions repositories.

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  • uuuh that looks tasty :-) I'll check that out. I let you know. – paradoxon Aug 4 '16 at 18:26
  • Just checked it out. I like the GUI interface, it is simple enough so a user can pause it when it is causing inconvenience. I also looked up duplicity. I still need to figure out scheduling because the GUI options are rather limited in this regard. But I am confident that I can work this out. In the worst case i need a crone job that does the monthly rotation. Thank you very much for this, it might save me a whole world of trouble. I also like that is GTK3 and it is in the fedora main repo :-) – paradoxon Aug 4 '16 at 19:46
  • @paradoxon: as said, have a look with the dconf-editor at the schema org.gnome.DejaDup for more settings, or use gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.DejaDup in the terminal for a first impression. – DJCrashdummy Aug 5 '16 at 9:43
  • @paradoxon: by the way... what do you want to achieve with "monthly rotation"? - keep in mind the backups are incremental; so you need all the files for restoring! – DJCrashdummy Aug 5 '16 at 9:54
  • Thx for the extra hints :-) I think I am good from here. I borrowed the term from log management. Where you stop writing to a file, rename and compress it and start a new one. I'd like to do do a similar thing with my backups. This way I only have the current month on site can bring the rest to a safe location of site. – paradoxon Aug 5 '16 at 10:47

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