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Subject: Encryption for backup on portable HDD's off-site storage

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Simon Farres User is Offline

United Kingdom
Member since
10/26/2005

Platinum Membership
Posts: 59

3/04/2008 02:11 PM
Dear SBS'ers Currently using the SBS backup utility for backup to NAS unit very successfully and intend to take regular copies of the .bkf from the NAS onto a set of 2 portable USB disks rotating the USB disks each day so that 1 disk is always off-site. I manually copy the .bkf files from the NAS to the portable HDD's. My concern is that the .bkf files from the SBS backup are not encrypted nor password protected. I therefore need a password-protected encryption solution for these 2 portable HDD. Does anybody know of a good, reliable, easy to use product that can do this encryption without having to completely change our present backup plan? The HDD are 250GB WD Passport drives formatted as NTFS, the .bkf files are in the region of 80GB each. Many thanks in advance.

Eriq Neale User is Offline

Texas, USA
Member since
5/3/2005

Microsoft MVP
Posts: 2105

3/18/2008 11:40 PM
Simon - I don't think the native tools have a way to do this, so you'll likely have to look to third party products to get that encryption. I've been using ShadowProtect from StorageCraft for a couple of years now with many clients, and a couple are using the encryption option provided in that tool. The US retail price on the software is $495, so it's not an outrageous cost to get encrypted backup to external HDD, and the data needs are much lower for SP as well. HTH... -Eriq

Eriq Neale - Small Business Specialist, SBS MVP, Mac Guru EON Consulting LLC www.eonconsulting.net Author of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed Listen to eOnCall at AIRtunZ or visit www.eoncall.com.

Simon Farres User is Offline

United Kingdom
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10/26/2005

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Posts: 59

3/19/2008 05:36 PM
Thanks for this Eriq, Not surprised that you have recommended ShadowProtect it looks an awesome piece of kit, outrageously fast backups and restores - however, we being a charity organisation the price becomes an issue in the short-term; perhaps a budget heading for next term tho. There are several 3rd party options specific to encryption-only (i.e. not a backup/restore solution) that I wanted to float here for SBSers comments: - Dekart Private Disk $45 - TrueCrypt $opensource - Bestcrypt by Jetico $60 - MySecureDoc (WinMagic) personal ed. $30 Has anyone used any of these before in any capacity; if I am honest I am probably err'ing towards trying TrueCrypt above the others although all of them look to do disk encryption brilliantly. Any thoughts?

Phil Bennett User is Offline

United Kingdom
Member since
10/2/2006

Registered Users
Posts: 121

4/15/2008 05:31 PM
Simon, I have used TrueCrypt on several occasions, until I upgraded to Backup Exec v12 (with encryption) Its does exactly what it says on the tin, but needs a bit of prior planning before use. Essentially you need to create a 'container' for the backup files (or whatever you want to put in there). As far as windows is concerned this is just a file (with no extension) The file is encrypted upon creation and is mounted as a volume into windows via the truecrypt software. You can then use it as a normal removable disk. The downside to it is that once you have created it, you cannot increase or reduce the size. (The file created by truecrypt will reflect the size you have entered from the start) So you need to make it large enough to cope with your future needs. The major problem with this is that it can take several hours to create this 'container'. i cant remember how long exactly, but creating a 100gb container on a USB drive (USB 2.0) took at least 5-6 hours. It is very processor intensive, so I would suggest doing this outside of office hours. Once this has been done, its a very good piece of software. If you need to know anything else about this, let me know and I will help if I can. Phil

Simon Farres User is Offline

United Kingdom
Member since
10/26/2005

Platinum Membership
Posts: 59

4/16/2008 10:44 AM
Phil, Thanks for your reply; I have been using TrueCrypt now for a couple of weeks and been very pleased with the results. You are right about the container creation, our 250GB container took about 8 hours to format, and I think it was the first time that I have seen our server actually break a sweat! The interesting thing is that once it has been created, writing a file to it takes no (noticeably) longer than a normal copy function - cool! I have no doubt that the other 3 programmes I mentioned (plus loads of others I'm sure) do just as well, but I am glad to be able to use opensource stuff and save the $/£. I might give TrueCrypt a go at encrypting a whole drive and using the auto-mount function instead of a container. Thanks again for your help and comments, Simon

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