Kellen wrote a nice introduction to incremental encrypted backups which might be useful to Linux users who’ve never setup anything similar.
Often Encryption isn’t given a lot of focus when creating remote backups; but if you don’t trust the remote host it is essential.
In what situation would you not trust the remote host?
Perhaps when agreeing to host a friends backups in exchange for your backups going to their machine.
Or when you’re backing up a company mailserver and you don’t want the backups (ie user mails) to be read by anybody who has access to the backup server.
Every instance where the remote machine is not under my direct control.
Well, here’s an example from us amatures.
I keep an old computer over at my friend’s house with some big hard drives in it so he can rip CD’s and give me the FLAC files. I set up a VPN to it from my house and use it as a remote back-up for some of my personal files incase my house ever burns down. Not that I don’t trust him, but I still encrypt everything I save over there.
I like it, I am going to try this with my FreebSD stuff.