Okay, so at my new job I'm the Guy if it has a transistor in it. I'm
developer, sysadmin, and hardware jockey all in one. This is fun
to a certain extent, since it tests pretty much everything I know from
A through Z. And so far, I'm doing okay. Every now and then, though,
I get a bit stumped.
My most recent adventure involves developing a backup routine for the
office. I just got tape backup working on a Linux box for a big
Samba-shared directory that we all work out of. I'm currently winging
it with star
and cpio
in =CRON=-scheduled scripts that manage a
6-tape rotation for me.
Full backups on alternating tapes on Fridays,
with incrementals inbetween on tapes labeled by the day. I even have
the server eject the tape and IM me a few times until I go change to
the day's tape. Tested recovery, and though it could be smoother, it
is at least possible at the moment. I figure this is pretty good
for my first personal encounter with managing serious backup. I plan
to keep researching and to upgrade software at some point soon.
So, now my boss asks me: "Hey, can you backup this other folder for me?
I don't want to share it, though, and I don't want you to be able to
read the files." This folder contains some important yet sensitive
things like salary information and other things to which I have no
business having access.
My stumper then, is this: How do I grab (or cause to be uploaded) a
folder of files for backup, say as large as 2GB, from a WinXP machine,
without having any access myself to read the file contents. I'll be
able to install whatever I need on the WinXP machine, but the idea is
that, when the bits leave that machine for the Linux backup server,
there should be no way for me to read their contents. But, I must be
able to usefully backup and, in conjunction with the owner of the
files, restore in case of disaster.
Oh yeah, and I have no budget for software. So, I'm trying to work
this out using only free tools.
So, my first though is some sort of encryption on the WinXP machine.
Encrypt with GPG or something, leaving my boss with the secret key
on a floppy and the passphrase in his head. Upload these files
to a special folder on our shared drive, and it all gets backed up
like everything else.
Or, since I don't even really want to know the names or number of
files in this sensitive folder, can I somehow ZIP up the whole
shebang and encrypt that before uploading?
Under Linux, none of this would be much of a problem to me. But,
under WinXP, my knowledge of available tools and means of automation
fail me.
Any hints from out there?
shortname=backup_question
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