Hardly a week goes by without some story in the news about a company leaking important data through loss of their backup tapes. Whether it is through malicious theft, opportunistic snatching, or accidental misplacement, there is a huge cost to a business when data is lost. When the data contains sensitive information about members of the public, possibly including bank account and credit card numbers, the cost can be severe indeed. Simply the stigma of having to notify clients that you've lost their data is extremely damaging.

Despite the obvious and well-known risks, I've found that few companies actually use encryption to protect their backups. This is quite surprising to me, considering how easy it is to do and just how costly it is to lose data. In this article, I'll show you how to add encryption to your backups, and I'll describe some of the pitfalls to watch out for.

Backup Scripts with Encryption

There are a couple of good open source tools that will do encryption nicely. Probably the best one is OpenSSL, which supports a wide range of ciphers and is very easy to add into existing backup scripts. Quite simply, the command:

Full Story.