Create an encrypted backup from your NAS directly to a cloud based file store. Such as Google drive, Onedrive, Amazon S3 or Dropbox.

Feb 28, 2021 | Linux, Security, Server administration, Technology | 0 comments

I have a lot of files. Not compared to some people. There’s only about 5tb actually. But they are almost all valuable. They have pictures of the children, family members, various guide dogs, holidays etc. I also have priceless audio recordings and videos that I really don’t want to lose. Of course, I back everything up to the NAS regularly and the NAS is in a RAID configuration so that if a disk fails, I can get the data back. I even have a few disks lying around with full backups that have been taken over the years. However, I wanted something a lot more reliable than this. I don’t consider myself to be a tin foil wearing member of the paranoid club but I don’t necessarily fully trust companies to keep my data safe and private either. So I have never backed up all of my treasured files to the cloud because I didn’t want them to be available to someone in the event of a breach on that platform.

A friend was talking about RClone last week. He surprised me by saying that he could even mount the encrypted backups and browse through them to recover specific files. More interestingly, the files didn’t need to be archived before copying them off the local NAS. He was using it through NextCloud however so I assumed wrongly that it was either going to be difficult to set up or it wouldn’t do what I expected. I’m really glad that I’m wrong here.

Getting it up and running is very easy. Install it, create a new mount for your cloud provider then create a second mount for the encryption.

You will then copy files to the encryption mount and it will in turn send the files over to your cloud provider.

If I was to write all the instructions out, I would be doing nothing more than replicating the work of people who know a lot more about RClone than I. So instead, please visit the following fantastic resources.

Google drive (rclone.org)

Tutorial for making an encrypted backup on cloud storage using rclone. · GitHub

Crypt (rclone.org)

If you are trying this out and you need a hand, give me a shout.

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