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Forum Discussion
Can You Password Protect USB HDD Rsync Backups?
I wasn’t able to find an answer in the Forum, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable can help. I have a NV+v1 which has run flawlessly for six years. It is used in a home environment. Long ago, thanks to some in this Forum, I got into a regular backup routine. I have two sets of usb hard drives, each set is a complete NAS backup, which I keep in two separate offsite locations. Every three months I rotate one set through and do Rsync incremental back up of all shares, thus each set is backed up every six months. I recently had to change the location where I keep one of those usb hard drive sets which got me thinking, if someone unauthorized should get ahold of them, with little effort, they would have access to all my personal and private files. So my question: Is there a way to have these back up hard drives password protected?
Here is my setup, I have several Shares, each with their own backup job due to size of Share and hard drive space. Each backup job is configured the same, except the destination path changes according to hard drive number, so I will use this one as an example:
RAIDiator 4.1.12 [1.00a043]
Standard File Protocols Rsync on.
External Hard Drive Formatted EXT3
Backup Source: Share: Documents
Backup Destination: Rsync Server
Host: localhost
Path: USB_HDD_9/Documents
Under Share Listing: USB_HDD_9 is set:
CIFS Default Access: Read/Write
HTTP/S Default Access: Read/Write
Rsync Default Access: Read/Write
Advanced Options: (at default settings)
Under the Source Share, the Rysnc Tab Default Access is set to Disabled.
I did try using the Rsync Password option, with a user name and password, and under the Backup Destination section, entered the login information. I did a Share backup with the password option. But when I plugged the usb hard drive into a Windows computer with an EXT3 driver, I was able to access and see all my files, without a username or password.
Thanks for the help.
Here is my setup, I have several Shares, each with their own backup job due to size of Share and hard drive space. Each backup job is configured the same, except the destination path changes according to hard drive number, so I will use this one as an example:
RAIDiator 4.1.12 [1.00a043]
Standard File Protocols Rsync on.
External Hard Drive Formatted EXT3
Backup Source: Share: Documents
Backup Destination: Rsync Server
Host: localhost
Path: USB_HDD_9/Documents
Under Share Listing: USB_HDD_9 is set:
CIFS Default Access: Read/Write
HTTP/S Default Access: Read/Write
Rsync Default Access: Read/Write
Advanced Options: (at default settings)
Under the Source Share, the Rysnc Tab Default Access is set to Disabled.
I did try using the Rsync Password option, with a user name and password, and under the Backup Destination section, entered the login information. I did a Share backup with the password option. But when I plugged the usb hard drive into a Windows computer with an EXT3 driver, I was able to access and see all my files, without a username or password.
Thanks for the help.
3 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- The user/password you entered is used as a login in the remote machine (which is the local machine in your case, but could have been a remote server). It can block access to your files over the network, but not when you are looking at the ext file system directly.
Rsync won't do what you want. You can use something like TrueCrypt, but I believe that would force you to do the backup on a PC - the NV+ doesn't have a fast enough CPU to run something like that natively w/o a big performance penalty. - Thank you StephenB for the quick response, you no doubt saved me several hours of trying to figure it out. Limitations are what they are, I will simply have to ensure the backup sets are kept in secure locations. Although it is well worth the risk, I can’t imagine not having offsite backups just in case of a catastrophic event. Over the years our family content has grown, would not want to lose those precious pictures and videos of the kids’ earlier years; besides, they may end up being our only proof we did take them places and do things for them. It has taken us these six years to get a little over 4TB, we were waiting until we hit our Sparc limitation of 5.4 TB before replacing, although it might be time to invest in a new ReadyNAS before then. It will be hard though, our NV+ is practically a member of the family.
- I use my NV+ for backing up some shares on my Pro. So maybe you can simply re-purpose it.
When the time comes, if you get an x86 unit you can also use cloud backup (though it requires learning some linux). I've been running crashplan for about 18 months, and it seems to be working well, and is inexpensive. However I wouldn't just use cloud backup.
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