[BackupPC-users] GUIDE: remote backups with rsync and windows 32bit

Here is a guide for remote backups with rsync and ssh and some other helper tools. This is not the only way to do this but it just plain works for me.

Just an FYI on remote backups with 32bit windows systems. I cannot get cygwin to run properly on 64bit windows systems.

Here is a brief of my setup. I just completed 90 days of thorough testing on this setup and it works very very well.

Programs:
MyEntunnel (this creates consistent SSH tunnels in windows)
deltacopy/rsync (any rsyncd for windows, i prefer deltacopy but it is just a wrapper for cygwin's rsync)
backuppc!

this is a pretty simple setup:

use MyEntunnel on windows and configure it to SSH back to your backuppc box if it is internet accessible. If it is not (like in my setup) then you can forward an alternative port for ssh to your backuppc box or you can ssh to a linux firewall box and have it listen on an alternative port.

MyEntunnel with a remote tunnel to my firewall:
8825:127.0.0.1:873
this will create a tunnel to my firewall and then have the firewall listen on port 8825 and forward that accross the tunnel to my laptop.
Use a different port for each client. I use 8825 for mine, and 8826 for the next and so on. These ports dont really matter as long as you dont use one that is already in use on the device you ssh into. The only device that will see these ports is the device you ssh into and the backuppc server.

in backuppc, change the RsyncClientPort of your client config to 8825 and change your client alias to the firewall box.

now backuppc will connect to the firewall box on 8825 and it will forward the rsyncd connection accross the tunnel

if you just port forward SSH
configure the client alias as 127.0.0.1 and set the RsyncClientPort to 8825.
instead of creating a remote tunnel with MyEntunnel, create a local tunnel with the same config 8825:127.0.0.1:783

what this will do is have rsync connect to the local machine on the alternative port and the tunnel will shoot it out to the remote client.

here are the goodies:
1) with MyEntunnel, you can have this link come up whenever you are online -OR- you have choose when to connect. This is nice if you are using an aircard or some slow connection and dont want to backup over this. There are also profiles so you can choose some services like imap/smtp but not rsync or whatever.

2) MyEntunnel (SSH) is able to compress the tunnel with gzip which will give you a compressed, encryped tunnel.

3) MyEntunnel can handle many different port forwards on the tunnel. I connect to a firewall and use the remote tunnels to create various different tunnels. For instance, imap and smtp over a compressed encrypted tunnel without SSL/TLS headaches(forward the port on your firewall against the local net(i like shorewall!!)). I also have my squid proxy available over the tunnel and use foxyproxy so I can use my local connection or my remote proxy depending on my need and I also use RDP over this ssh connection.

I do run this over my aircard without issues. I dont have too many files ( maybe 1000 or so ) that I backup and my data doesnt change much between backups. rsync is pretty friendly and is fine over the slower aircard.

I find that this is excelent for connecting to my email server. I get much faster access to my imap. I do have TLS setup but it is not compressed and these tunnels are!. I use it as a compressed proxy when out of 3G coverage when im getting 40Kb/s on my aircard. oh yeah, and it works great for backups :)

good luck.

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