rsync useful w/ encrypted files?

Posted by barrycarter on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by barrycarter
Published on 2010-12-26T22:10:27Z Indexed on 2010/12/27 3:54 UTC
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encryption

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backup

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rsync

Is rsync efficient for transferring encrypted files? More specifically:

I encrypt 'x' with my public key and call the result 'y'.
I rsync 'y' to my backup server.
'x' changes slightly
I encrypt the modified 'x' and rsync the modified 'y' to my backup server.

Is this efficient? I know a small change in 'x' yields a large change in 'y', but is the change localized? Or has 'y' changed so thoroughly that rsync is not much better than scp?

I currently backup my "critical" files by tarring/bzipping them nightly, then encrypting the .tar.bz file and rsync'ing it to my backup server.

Many of the individual files don't change, but, of course, the tar file changes if even one of the files change.

Is this efficient? Should I be encrypting and backing up each file individually? That way, unchanged files will take no time to rsync.

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