Backup strategy to offsite

[Pestaninha]

Hi,

I'm sure someone has asked this before but I ran a google search and a forum search and didn't find anything that has my exact requirements, so I'm posting here to discuss.

Myself and a friend have decided to provide a DR offsite backup to one another. While I'm using FreeNAS, the heathen has decided to go with OpenMediaVault and, on top of that, ext4 filesystem.

I have the following requirements:
Encryption of the backup
Backups need to be performed via the network

My first thought was to use snapshots. If I send a snapshot over to his system, will it be encrypted? And if I go with this solution, which would be the best substitute for zfs send | zfs receive? Just rsync the snapshots over to his system?

My other method and I'm leaning towards that one, is to use a software called duplicity which is basically rsync with encryption. With this method, I'll run the software inside a jail and just use duplicity via SSH to sync the files between the two remote computers. This seems like a good choice, but since I don't know much regarding snapshots and their capabilities I thought I'd ask here to find out if there's a better way to accomplish this.

As a bonus note, I'm considering writing a quick script to periodically stage a DR (say once a month), download all files to a "test" pool, and check mdsums agains the originals, emailing the results and cleaning up afterwards. If I end up doing that, I'll share the code here.

Thanks

 

[toadman]

If the receiving side is not ZFS you'd have to send a shapshot as a file. (A snapshot in ZFS is part of the filesystem, so you can't send it to a non-ZFS file system.) If sending as a file, the ability to do incremental sends is lost. You'd be sending all files on each send.

So yes, pick your file based sync approach of choice and go that route.

 

[Pestaninha]

If the receiving side is not ZFS you'd have to send a shapshot as a file. (A snapshot in ZFS is part of the filesystem, so you can't send it to a non-ZFS file system.) If sending as a file, the ability to do incremental sends is lost. You'd be sending all files on each send.

So yes, pick your file based sync approach of choice and go that route.

Hadn't thought of that because I'm not really concerned in sending only the deltas. But it does make sense not to use that, as I'd be sending over 200GB/300GB at a time, when I could be sending a few megs or gigs. I'm only sending to the DR my absolutely essential backups, not my entire pool.

Thanks toadman!