[Hidden-tech] New Massachusetts Encryption Law

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Mark Firehammer wrote:
> I use Retrospect. They have a number of products that encrypt backups. Mac
> or PC
>
> "Highest level, government standard security for backup media
> Retrospect can use 128- or 256-bit AES encryption, in addition to
> SimpleCrypt and DES encryption to ensure the security of your data."
>  
> http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retroforwin/ 
>   


Roger Williams wrote:
> All recent versions of AMANDA support encryption.  This might be a good
> solution if you already have your tape drives.
>
> But if you were thinking about buying new tape drives, it would be a good idea
> to compare the prices of drives with hardware encryption.
>   


Roger Williams wrote:
> One of my colleagues pointed out that Bacula can also do this.  It might be a
> bit more versatile than Amanda.
>   


RA Cohen wrote:
>
> Bacula certainly supports data encryption -->>  
> http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/Data_Encryption.html
>
> All of my clients are running bacula and I am certainly available to 
> assist others with this fine "Enterprise-Grade" program.


Well, we could get into religious wars here. ;-)

Amanda and Bacula are both open source projects and typically require a 
little more effort in the initial setup than some commercial products. 
But they are free and have free community support.

Both products also have commercial support available from various 
consultants and companies. It seems that Bacula has a little stronger 
local support from consultants in Europe, although Amanda clearly has 
stronger commercial support worldwide. Zmanda has been providing 
commercial support for a few years as well as funding programmers to 
work on the project; and, through their enterprise partnership with Sun, 
has enlisted Sun contract support for enterprises worldwide. So, in the 
last few years, Amanda development has moved faster and more solidly. 
They are one of the few open source projects that has been Security 
Certified by the Department of Homeland Security. They have also 
recently developed an interface for backing up to Amazon S3. So, you can 
put your encrypted data out on the cloud, if you choose.

Recently, linuxquestions.org held their annual members choice awards, 
and Amanda finished well ahead of Bacula in the voting.

Several years back, if I were in a Mac or Windows environment (without 
Linux or Unix), I would have *highly* recommended Retrospect. I don't 
think there has ever been a better product or better customer support 
than what Dantz Development had in Retrospect in the 1990's on the Mac. 
It isn't exactly dying on the vine; but, in the years since it was 
bought out by EMC, it hasn't received the attention that I think it 
should. I still have situations where I use it, and I haven't found what 
I would regard as a really good alternative in the Small to Medium 
Business market for Mac and Windows. There certainly are products out 
there, but user complaints are typically loud and/or the prices are very 
high.

When I chose between Amanda and Bacula several years ago, I chose Amanda 
for a couple of reasons. I thought the programming support was stronger, 
the long term history was stronger, I liked the structure and approach, 
and it didn't have the complexity for running and for disaster recovery 
in terms of all the things it required. For Bacula, you have to be 
running multiple daemons and an SQL database. Sometimes, the SQL 
database can be the performance bottleneck. In disaster recovery 
situations, you have more to get up and running before you can really 
start recovering, and recovering an SQL database can be a project in 
itself. With Amanda, I can read the tapes with native utilities and 
basically just need a Linux or Unix system with a tape drive. I've also 
had unbelievably good rock solid stability from Amanda.  When I had a 
hardware failure on my tape drive a couple of years ago, I didn't have 
time to be worrying about what Amanda was doing. I had to focus on 
getting the drive repaired and dealing with the vendor. That ended up 
taking a couple of days. Amanda's intelligent planner automatically 
dropped back and did incremental backups only to disk, trying to 
conserve holding disk space until the tape drive became available again. 
When the tape drive was repaired, late one evening, and I went home dog 
tired, Amanda noticed it running, cycled through the tapes, and 
automatically flushed the incrementals out to tape and began catching up 
on full backups. The next morning, all I had to do was read the email 
report from Amanda to see that things were back to normal. I never had 
to touch Amanda through the whole episode. It just did what it was 
supposed to do, and my systems continued to get backed up every night.

Anyway, for either Amanda or Bacula, you need a slightly more tech savvy 
sysadmin to get things set up and running. Typically, the server will be 
Linux or Unix. Both can back up Macs and PCs.


-- 
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Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4