[lug] Backup system ideas

[Ben Luey]

I've been looking at dirvish, (thanks for the info) and it looks really
cool as a backup system. I wondering about security, though: the howto
suggests using ssh keys so the backup computer can login to the main
computer *as root* without a password and then you can cron the dirvish
backup on the backup-computer. This strikes me as a bad idea since then if
someone hacks the backup server, they have full access to the main server.
Is there a way around this? I've been compressing my data on the main
server to a file and rsyncing that file with a cron script, but the backup
computer logins in (w/o password) as a very restricted user. If I create a
dirvish user on the main server, that user has to have read access to
everything I want to backup, which isn't trivial in my case. Can you setup
dirvish to be pushed from the main server, instead of from the backup
server, so then the server just needs a ssh key to someone with disk space
on the backup computer?

Any ideas? I'd like to try it if I could trust it.

Thanks,

Ben


> Warren Sanders wrote:
>
>> rsync! Here is a classy take on rsync: http://www.dirvish.org/
>
> Wow...
>
> I decided to give dirvish a whirl (pun intended!) on a couple of home
> machines just to see how it did, and I'm impressed.
>
> That's really damn cool.
>
> I just decided to set up a cronjob for that and leave it running on the
> internal big disk machine -- now it'll grab snapshots of the other two
> boxes nightly.
>
> Slick.  We'll see how it handles errors and dumb stuff like machines
> being off, etc... over time...
>
> Nate
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-- 
Ben Luey
lueyb at colorado.edu