Data backup in the cloud with Duplicati
The topic of online backups took on a whole new aspect after the Snowden revelations of recent weeks and months. Even before the NSA scandal, however, people were wondering how safe their data would be with a cloud provider (see the "Persistent Criticism" box). Although manual encryption of the data up front can help mitigate concern, the process also involves a huge amount of effort and makes the entire workflow complex.
A remedy has appeared in the form of a small open source tool named Duplicati [1], which kills two birds with one stone: It includes back ends for many important cloud services, so you can forget about using the native clients, and it encrypts all your data before transferring.
In fact, the program offers a third distinct advantage over manually backing up data via the provider's native cloud client: As true backup software, Duplicati not only flexibly helps you select the data to be backed up, it also backs up data on the fly that you can't easily access as a user. Additionally, clients are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, so the program can be deployed seamlessly on multiple platforms.
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