We here at Curious System Solutions use dreamhost as our hosting provider. One of the nice things they give us is a nice, tidy, backup every month, if we ask for it. It may take a few days if you ask at the beginning of the month, and it is easy to forget to download. So, we have a handy python script that will check an imap4 email server to see if the backup is ready, and if so, download it. The script is designed to be a cron job that can be ran every night so you don\’t have to worry about remembering to download things.
Encrypted, remote backup
So, I\’m a big fan of backups. I\’m a bigger fan of differential backups. My personal favorite method of doing them is using the rdiff-backup script on a linux box. What happens when you have sensitive information that you need to remotely backup. Do you upload a new encrypted file of everything every night? Do you have to download the whole file to get to one file? If you were using an encrypted tarball or sometype of encrypted loopback file, like truecrypt, then the answer would be yes. That is bad if you have a slow link. One way to solve that is to do encryption on each file. To do this we can use EncFS and sshfs. Both of these are in the default repositories for the current ubuntu versions.
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