Encrypted & Fast Remote Storage - Any alternatives to Samba and SSHFS?

Question

I'm trying to set up a backup system, where the backup destination is a laptop sitting in another room of my house in the same network. The backup tool - in my case: Acronis True Image 2016 - would then backup remotely to that laptop.

My backup source is a Windows 7 machine. The laptop, which is the backup destination, has both Windows 7 and Ubuntu installed.

Now i have a few options as to how I can implement remote storage/filesystem/whatever you call it:

1) SSHFS

I would basically get a tool like win-sshfs and mount my laptop's filesystem securely on my Windows machine with a drive letter. And then I'd just tell Acronis True Image to save the backup file to that mounted drive.

Problem is, I've tried many, many solutions which implement SSHFS (or just SFTP but mounted in Explorer), but I've found that really all of them are nothing but garbage. The most common problem I've found with them is that they are all very slow and sluggish. Win-sshfs 4every1-edition actually had a very good transfer speed, but crashes as soon as i enter too many subdirectory levels and was generally very unreliable. Weird.

2) Samba

I've installed Samba on my Laptop's Ubuntu system and connected my Windows machine to it. The first thing I noted was that the transfer speed was absolutely excellent and much faster than any of the SFTP/SSHFS solutions I've tried. Only problem that I have is, Samba doesn't seem to support encryption. I've messed around with parameters like "smb encrypt = mandatory" or "server signing = mandatory" etc., but when capturing outgoing traffic from my Windows machine, I could still see the traffic in plain text. And even though my backup machine is just in the local network, I'd still like to have traffic encryption.

Is there any other way/solution of remote storage (preferably open source and non-commercial)?

And if no, maybe any other suggestion? Is there an SSHFS application that isn't complete garbage? Anything?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The best way to handle this is to separate the backup requirement from the encryption requirement:

• Use a VPN to manage the encryption (OpenVPN is trivially easy)
• Use rsync (or Acronis with Samba or NFS or whatever) for the backup

This has the benefit of needing nearly no reconfiguration, if you chose to expand into a road warrior scenario or add more clients.