Secure Remote Backups (using SSH) - Using a backup user account

[David Nicholls]

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Hi There.

I am very sorry for the complete noob question :)

I was looking at the basic remote rsync backup artical at:

http://servers.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/11/04/0346256&tid=119&tid=47&pagenum=1

I am backing up various servers, both locally and remotely. I am only
interested in backing up /home and /var/log I can do almost everything
as a user backup, with the other users being members of group backup
with read permissions on all the relevant files needed to backup.
However, I also need to backup an email server which uses MailDir. The
default permissions of which are dwrx------, so cannot be placed into
the backup group.

I don't want to 'auto' ssh using the root account, for obvious reasons,
I also do not think it a good idea to change the default permissions on
the MailDir directories!

I just wondered if some kind soul would give me a pointer! Obviously I
need to make the solution as secure as possible and I'm sure there is
some stupidly obvious solution, but for once google isn't helping! :)

As a possible answer to my own question, if I do not run rsync as a
daemon, when I invoke the rsync command, does it read settings from
rsyncd.conf? If so I can ssh using the backup user and run rsync as root?

Thanks

Dave



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