Geeforce

What about a virtual filesystem which is encrypted like TrueCrypt? Well that’s easy on Linux.
In the last step we even do this on a remote host with ssh. So in this case we have a remote backup.
But the other site can’t do anything with the file, it only looks like a big and it is encrypted.

Let’s begin local:

• Let’s create a container:dd if=/dev/urandom of=Container count=1 bs=10M
  A file filled with random data with the size of 10Mb is created. If you want to speed up the process, you could use io=/dev/zero
• Create a loopback device
  losetup /dev/loop1 Container
• Format the container (ext2 in this case, of course you can use ext3/4)mkfs /dev/loop1
• Mount the container, so we can use it to store data in
  mkdir /media/virtalspace
  mount /dev/loop1 /media/virtualspace

After mounting, you can access this virtual filesystem just as usual. Well a backup is not a backup when it’s on the same drive.

So at least do this on a USB drive/stick or something. But what if you want to make backups at the linux-server at your friends place?
Of course you trust your friend, but just to be sure we are going to encrypt the container.

We need a ssh connection and some extra packages from EPEL for this. We are using sshfs (ssh filesystem) for this.

Install fuse-sshfs, for CentOS with yum install fuse-sshfs. After this do:

• mkdir /media/remote_sshfs
•  sshfs [USER]@[HOST]:/home/[user]/backup /media/remote_sshfs
  /home/user/backup needs to be there and has the right permissions.
  Supply your password and that’s it. A remote filesystem over ssh.

Now we are going to make the backup container/filesystem on the remote side:

• dd -io=/dev/urandom if=/media/remote_sshfs/backup-container count=1 bs=10M
  Ofcourse 10Mb is not much for a backup, just play with it and use a large file later.
• TIP as it seems you have ssh access, create the file on the other side by logging in, as it takes (a long) time to create the file.

Next steps will follow….

Here you can find general Linux, like tip, tricks and so one. Just the things I ran into and wanna share with you folks.