Articles: Secure encrypted backup solutions

An acquaintance of mine want to do an off-line backup, but that bring up the interesting question: do you trust your provider?

Hopefully the answer is no. Not that you think the provider will read through the documents on purpose, but in these days with crackers and script-kiddies running around like maniacs and sensitive US Army documents ending on peer to peer (p2p) networks.

You have several options to perform a secure backup, either using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to a dumpsite or my prefered solution using rsync. Rsync has the ability to transfer only the binary difference between two files hence is very efficient for updating the backup at a later time.

One option is to use Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG). This is an option that is very easy to implement if you have a relatively small amount of data you want to back up, from one document to a couple hundred megabytes. To read more about using GnuPG you can visit our site at http://www.secure-my-email.com .

If you have more data you will want another solution. For Windows you can use an application such as TrueCrypt . Say you create an encrypted volume on drive C: named "my-documents.vol", one option would be to use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a keysize of 256 bits. For those technically interested, AES is equivalent to Rjindael, that won the competition due to amongst other things low memory usage.

This encrypted volume is protected by a passphrase and you can mount it e.g. as a drive d: and use it exactly as you'd use a USB drive or a hard-disk. When you are done using the documents, you can umount it, and nobody can use the documents again until you again unlock it with a password. You can then simply backup the file my-documens.vol.

This has the positive side-effect that you secure your data when it is stored on your computer as well. This should be implemented on all computers, especially laptop systems, as it will relieve you of some stress in the case your laptop get stolen. I'm sure you've read about sosial security numbers and lists of bank accounts and users getting stolen when college or bank employee's computers get stolen. Please try to avoid this by some simple matters of installing an application to encrypt the data.

You can read more at secure-my-internet.com

Good luck with securing both your data while residing on the computer and on the backup-facility.