Matthew Botos

Merle commented that my comptuer problem had reminded her to do her own backups, so I thought I’d share my methods:

My Linux and Windows machines use rsync and cwrsync to backup important files to one other each night. For “off-site” backup, I copy these to my half-empty iPod about once a month. There’s already a slick solution to this for Mac which provides a good starting point.

Having all your files unencrypted on a highly portable device isn’t the best security, so I looked for an encryption solution and found TrueCrypt. One look at the user manual convinced me I was in the right place: it covers plausible deniability, concealing one encrypted filesystem within another, and even discusses all the algorithms it uses. Plus it’s open source.

I soon learned that Windows iPods are FAT32 formatted, and thus subject to the 4 GB file size limit. TrueCrypt writes it’s encrypted filesystem as a regular file, so it took 2 to make enough space. After that, I just had to script up a few rsync commands to dump the backups of both my machines to the iPod. The script also mounts and unmounts the encrypted filesystems, so all it needs now is to be automatically kicked off whenever the iPod is connected.