[Box Backup] even more feature requests

[Ben Summers]

On 2 Feb 2004, at 20:01, Juan Vera wrote:

> hello
>
>  let me start by making clear that I didn't install
> BoxBackup yet, so maybe I'll have more requests later;
> also excuse my english :)
>
> this was sent to Ben privatelly and he asked me to
> post in the mailing list:
>
> <snip>

To fill in a possible gap in the narrative, Juan asked if the servers 
could be used in "pull" mode, where the backup server connects to the 
backup clients, rather than the more conventional way around.

>
> Yes, that is exactly what I need: a server on internal network
> fetching backups from other internal and some external servers.
>
> The reason is mainly firewalling, but I do also backup remote
> servers that have no way to get into the internal network (and
> should stay in that way :). Plus I like the idea of a "closed to
> everyone" backup server more than the "public area to backup",
> no matter that it is still possible talk to that server when it
> connects to each box.

I hadn't ever really considered this, as I'd always anticipated the 
backup servers being "publicly accessible" as there's nothing of value 
to an attacker stored on it. Denial of service attacks are possible, 
though.

However, this would be a nice addition, and something which isn't too 
difficult to do. It's just really reversing the connection direction, 
then everything happens as it does now. Both ends are authenticated 
anyway.

I have added it to my ever growing list of things to do!

>
> And now another question comes to my mind. What about off site
> backups? Can I burn Box Backup's repositories to dvd and restore
> then latter? I have on-line backups now but I still need to have
> the posibility to have them offsite, in case of fire, earth quakes,
> etc, you know.

Yes, simply archive the contents of the "backup" directories under the 
raid file directories. You should only need to archive two of them, and 
the raid system will recover the data properly from that, or archive 
each to a separate DVD for redundancy.

>
> Other than that, Box Backup does exactly what I'm doing now
> manually using an ssh/tar/gpg/scripts mix that I'd really
> would like to replace.

Let me know what happens if you try it!

Ben