A sweet little tool called 'rsyncrypto'. Pt 1

I had something of a specific need. I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I'm going to outline how I handled it.

I am NO good at keeping any kind of physical media. Quite some time ago, I took all the CD's I owned and ripped them to MP3 because I found that I was losing CD's constantly. Now, when I buy a new CD, I immediately rip it to MP3. My MP3 store has been with me ever since the days of having to upload a song to an FTP server so I could get my ratio high enough to download a few songs. Old school Internet folks know what I'm talking about.

I decided that I wanted to carry this over to my paper media also. I seem to lose receipts and documents such as this all the time. So I decided to start scanning them and keeping them in on my server.

As a backup to all my media, I upload the "/share" mount up to a server that I run a website on. Unfortunately, that website is somewhat popular, so the system is under constant attack. When you're talking about my mp3 collection, you're not really talking about super sensitive stuff. If you want to jack my copy of Billy Jean you can be my guest. However, when you're talking about jacking a copy of my marriage license, we're in another ballpark.

So I had to determine a good way to encrypt my data on the server without a tremendous hassle on the home front. I'm not going to be able to get my wife to run some sort of encryption on every document that gets scanned and put into the store. In addition, I'm worried that I'll lose my encryption key if I use methods that require passwords. And quite plainly, there just is no way to enforce it. I would forget some file. Which would be the most important one. No, my solution would have to be seamless on the back end. I would only want to interact with it when I needed to recover a file that went missing.

Now, I'm no Linux Bigot. I love Linux, believe me, but if there is an easy solution out there, I'm actually willing to pay for it. I did a ton of research in this space. I thought about a Windows share with a backup client like Mozy or iDrive. As I dug into this space, I found that they have issues of their own. You can search the interwebs for these products, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

The closest thing I could find that did what I wanted was Jungle Disk. Which uses a separate program to encrypt compared to the storage, which is S3 based.

But I have to pay for that. I don't mind paying. But why pay when I can get it for free.

Enter 'rsyncrypto'. I just happened to search on Freshmeat for encryption, and I found it. At first, it was confusing, but I already use rsync to push of my /share store to the server, it might just do exactly what I want it to.

In my next post, I'll detail exactly how I am using it. Because even if you know how I am doing it, you can't put it together unless you have the pieces of the puzzle on my home hard drive. Very nice.

An addition to the Blog

Well, at some point, I said that I wouldn't do this anymore if I didn't have something compelling to talk about. Bah, that's what we all say. Try this on for compelling.

I'm pretty excited about this. It's interesting to me that people are so happy to give you advice about your kids. Especially people who have kids. I'm not trying to say that I know it all, but I have never encountered a subject in which almost everyone is so willing to give advice. I'm not hatin'. I understand that people are just trying to help. It's cool with me. As long as I know you. If I don't know you, don't try to tell me about what I should do. That just sucks.