New Hub feature: Auto-Restore TKLBAM backup to a new cloud server

Since we announced the release of TurnKey Hub v1.0 two weeks ago, we followed up with the two top issues users reported, and continued to receive awesome feedback - you guys rock, keep it coming!

Announcing TurnKey Hub v1.0 - now officially out of private beta

Hub Front

When we first announced the TurnKey Hub private beta about 9 months ago, we had limited capacity (invitation only) and a modest feature set. Since then we tested, bugfixed, removed bottlenecks and added features, constantly improving the Hub with the help and feedback from our excellent beta users. Thank you so much!

Passphrase dictionary attack countermeasures in tklbam's keying mechanism

Background: how a backup key works

In TKLBAM the backup key is a secret encrypted with a passphrase which is uploaded to the Hub.  Decrypting the backup key yields the secret which is passed on to duplicity (and eventually to GnuPG) to be used as the symmetric key with which backup volumes are encrypted on backup and decrypted on restore.

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

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Backups are hard, making sure you got it right - harder

According to Murphy's Law, everything that can go wrong, eventually will go wrong.

This is true for backups on multiple levels. A backup is often our last line of defense when things go wrong, but so many things can go wrong with the backup itself that we usually don't find out about it until, well, horror of horrors, the backup fails.

On the surface, backups can fail for zillions of reasons.

Exploring S3 based filesystems S3FS and S3Backer

In the last couple of days I've been researching Amazon S3 based filesystems, to figure out if maybe we could integrate that into an easy to use backup solution for TurnKey Linux appliances.

Note that S3 could only be a part of the solution. It wouldn't be a good idea to rely exclusively on S3 based automatic backups because of the problematic security architecture it creates. If an attacker compromises your server, he can easily compromise and subvert or destroy any S3 based automatic backups. That's bad news.