Viktor Petersson.com
Posts Tagged ‘S3’
This idea hit me this morning. Assuming you have a decent connection at home (not ADSL or Cable that is), Amazon S3 (or Jungle Disk) makes a pretty nice back-bone for a home NAS. It is fairly cheap and you will no longer worry about growing out of your array or failing disks. Yes, I reckon that if you store your data without encryption (even in a private bucket), it may leak out. However, as long as you’re not storing top-secret government files, I think you’ll be fine.
While you could just use something like Transmit on your Mac to mount the S3 share locally, it’s not ideal for home network if you have multiple machines. Instead, we can set up a simple server (virtual or physical) to act as a gateway to the remote storage.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
- Install Ubuntu (or your favorite Linux distribution) on a server (virtual or physical)
- Install s3fs if you’re S3 or the Jungle Disk for Linux.
- Mount the remote drive to something like /shared
- Install and configure Samba to share /shared to the local network
If you’re using S3, create a private bucket. I’m not sure how that works on Jungle Disk.
To increase the reliability of our backups at WireLoad, we wanted to utilize S3. Obviously we couldn’t just send our backups to S3 without encrypting them, so GnuPG was part of the equation from the beginning. As I started my research, I found a ton guides on how to utilize a variety of backup tools to get your backups delivered to S3. Some of the tools looked really promising. After reading the specs, Duplicity stood out as the winner. It supported S3, encryption and the whole shebang. It even supported incremental backups. Bingo I thought. That’s perfect.
That said, I installed Duplicity on a test-server and started experimenting with it. As I’m fairly familiar with GnuPG and PGP encryption, I reckoned that the ideal setup would be the standard public/private key structure and only have the public key installed on the server. The private key would be stored elsewhere. So far so good, Duplicity asked for the public key in its configure, but it still asked for the passphrase when running. Surely, you could store the passphrase in plain text and parse it to Duplicity, but that’s kind of pointless, as it defeats the purpose of a passphrase.
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