topic Re: Encrypting Backups in Operating System - HP-UX

Encrypting Backups

Michael Ernstoff — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:51:05 GMT

Has anyone any experience (and advice to offer) of encrypting tape backups?
Did you use hardware or software encryption?
Affect on backup times?

Thanks

Re: Encrypting Backups

Tony Constantine_1 — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 11:20:37 GMT

Michael

Take a look at this link

http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x6b5768c57f64d4118fee0090279cd0f9,00.html

Re: Encrypting Backups

Stefan Farrelly — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 12:18:39 GMT

The only possibility I know of is using the command crypt before your backup is written to tape. eg. use tar, crypt the tar file with a key then write it to tape. Not ideal, but I think it should work and I dont know of any other method of encrypting backups from HP-UX (except possibly downloading pgp for HP-UX and using it instead of crypt).

Re: Encrypting Backups

Darrel Louis — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 12:39:54 GMT

The experience I have with Omniback.
Always use Hardware compression or encryption, because software uses a lot of CPU time.

Hardware encryption is faster.

Re: Encrypting Backups

Michael Ernstoff — Fri, 01 Dec 2000 15:43:53 GMT

Does Omniback have an encryption option then?

Re: Encrypting Backups

Darrel Louis — Fri, 01 Dec 2000 17:45:12 GMT

In the latest (3.10 and 3.50) of OBII its called data encoding.

Administrator Guide:
Page 186
Encode
Open Systems and public networking make data security in large
enterprises essential. OmniBack II lets you encode file and rawdisk data so that it becomes unreadable. Data is encoded before it is transferred over the network and before it is written to media. OmniBack II uses a fixed, built-in algorithm for this purpose.
By default, the encode option is set to OFF.

OB2ENCODE: Allows a user to always turn on data encoding regardless how the backup options are set in the backup specification.

The OB II A.03.10 Release Notes state the following information:

While the built-in data encoding and software data compression is still supported by OB II A.03.10, the customization interface is no longer supported. Backups generated using
customer supplied shared libraries for encoding or software data compression, cannot be restored after the client system
is upgraded to A.03.10.

The OB II A.03.50 Release Notes also contain the above information.
The customization option was removed at A.03.10, and at the same time the option was changed from Encrypt to Encode.