[Box Backup] Some questions

Richard Wallace boxbackup at fluffy.co.uk
Mon Feb 28 18:20:11 GMT 2005


Hey guys,

I've been using box backup in snapshot mode for about a week now and 
have to say I'm impressed.  There are a couple of things that I'm 
curious about.

How do you delete snapshots of files older than a certain number of 
days?  I can't seem to find any documentation on this.  Is this not 
possible yet?

I'm also greatly looking forward to being able to mark the state of 
snapshots to further emulate tape changes and being able to do monthly, 
weekly, daily types of backups.  Any idea on when we can expect this?

The last thing that I'm curious about is how the encryption is done. 
Before finding and starting to use box backup I was planning on creating 
something similar and looked at number of alternatives.  The main thing 
was that the backed up data be encrypted.  I looked at a number of 
methods of doing this and came to the conclusion that the only really 
secure way is to do the encryption on the client so that the server 
never sees any actual plain text data.  Otherwise, someone that hacks 
the machine being backed up to can just replace the bbackupd process 
with something of their own and grab the encryption keys.  So the data 
must be encrypted on the client before being sent to the server.  I'll 
dive into the code and verify this if no one can give a quick, "Yes, the 
data is encrypted on the client before ever being sent to the server."

Thanks,
Rich



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