Maintaining encrypted network backup on Win 7

October 28, 2010 5:37 AM

Have 2 Windows 7 Pro computers. PC1 is my primary workstation, and PC2 I've been using with the TV for WMC/Hulu. I wanted to start using PC2 to backup the data on PC1, but PC2 is always logged in to record tv or play recordings. How do I ensure that data that I backup to PC2 is only visible/modifiable to PC1?

I'm presently using truecrypt to encrypt PC1's OS/data hard drives, but I can't access PC2's "backup" partition over the network if it were encrypted with truecrypt unless it were read-only, or unencrypted and then shared on PC2, which is not ideal because anyone using that computer would then be able to access it.

I even tried using freenas on virtualbox with raw disk access, but I found that freenas couldn't read SMART values through this method, and there were issues with power management and disk spin-up.

I'm under the impression that NTFS file permissions aren't sufficient since it's fairly easy to reset a user's password.

Is there a simpler solution that I just haven't seen?

posted by palionex to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I would suggest creating a truecrpyt volume (in a file container) on a share on the destination PC2 and backup into that (created and mounted from PC1 obviously). Performance might be a little sucky but fine for backups.
posted by samj at 6:21 AM on October 28, 2010

Encrypted backup, or if PC2 is running as a non-admin user, just create another user and create a share with restricted permissions.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:50 AM on October 28, 2010

Have you tried Crashplan?
posted by bering at 6:36 AM on November 1, 2010