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Kebab

Kebab is a backup tool that prioritizes confidentiality, integrity, and availability above all else. Kebab creates full backups of your files that are compressed and encrypted and then stored on Amazon S3 or in another directory. To reduce the likelihood of bugs, Kebab is a small amount of code, forgoing features like deduplication and incremental backups. Kebab features:

Limitations

Kebab is not space efficient since every backup is a full backup. To reduce complexity and code size, Kebab does not provide features like deduplication or incremental backups. However, Kebab does compress your data using tar/gzip.

Kebab is still useful if you do not have a lot of data, or you have a lot of bandwidth, or you organize your data so that it is easy to backup only what changes (for example, a maildir with a separate directory for each month of mail).

Another limitation of Kebab is that it calls out to tar and gzip, which are relatively large pieces of software. In the future, Kebab may switch to using the archive/tar and compress/gzip packages instead.

Getting Started

  1. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store your backups and a JSON file that identifies this bucket:

     $ cat s3bucket.json
     {
         "Service": {
             "Region":"us-east-1",
             "AccessKey":"XYZ...",
             "AccessKeyId":"ABC..."
         },
         "Bucket":"kebab_482731..."
     }
    
  2. Install Kebab:

     $ export GOPATH=...
     $ go get github.com/davidlazar/kebab/...
    
  3. Run tests:

     $ go test -v -s3 s3bucket.json github.com/davidlazar/kebab/...
     $ go test -v github.com/davidlazar/go-crypto/...
    
  4. Create a key file with a strong passphrase that you can memorize:

     $ kebab -keygen -key kebab.key
     Passphrase: ...
    
  5. With a pen and paper, make physical copies of your key file and store them somewhere safe:

     $ cat kebab.key
     wab77 b8fxk waqkz
     q0j9e 8jxqx vcc94
     64bb5 egb1d rpggb
     dbg4v 86ygw f4fzg
    
  6. Create some backups:

     $ kebab -bucket s3bucket.json -key kebab.key -put email-$(date "+%Y-%m-%d") email \
     -putfrom docs-$(date "+%Y-%m-%d") ~/sensitive docs
    
  7. Restore backups:

     $ kebab -bucket s3bucket.json -key kebab.key -get email-2015-03-14 -get ...
    

Copyright

Kebab Copyright (C) 2015 David Lazar