BackupEDGE 2.1

By Tony Lawrence
2005-05-03

How do I know it's Really Encrypted?

If you have the passphrase stored on the system, the restore just transparently restores data. Even if you've removed the local storage, all that happens is that you get asked for the phrase - maybe it's all just a shell game?

Well, no. And there is a way to prove it, though it gets a little complicated. These backups are tar compatible: you CAN read and restore an archive with plain old tar. That's true, but if you also set software data compression, tar will just bring back a compressed file. In the olden days, you could just tack a .Z extension on and uncompress it, but times have changed. Microlite explains:

 The 2.x BackupEDGE format was designed to be useful given todays

computing environment, with backwards compatibility whenever possible.



Given 5,000 character pathnames, encryption, embedded checksums and

all of the other features in the product, not everything could be

backwards compatible.



To get the performance (both from a speed and space standpoint) we

wanted, we went to zlib and started "segmenting" files into chunks

on the archive (to alleviate the "compress into a pipe" problem).



If you restore large compressed files with tar (assuming you have

short enough paths), you get zlib-d chunks that could be re-assembled

with a short C program. That program is - - - edge.



This is not the old days. BackupEDGE is NOT just a tar extension,

and copies of BackupEDGE are ALWAYS available on line in an

emergency.



Although we've kept an amazing amount of compatibility, we had to

make changes to get people the features they need.

So, if we are really untrusting and want to prove that encryption really happens, the easy way is to turn OFF software compression, do a domain backup, and restore the file(s) with tar. You will see that encryption really has been used.

Tutorial Pages:
» BackupEDGE 2.1
» New Features
» Encryption
» How do I know it's Really Encrypted?
» URL's and Filesystem Resources
» Dislikes

© Copyright 2005 A.P. Lawrence

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