Re: [rdiff-backup-users] backing up a Bitcoin wallet (private key)

[Thomas Harold]

On 12/9/2013 11:48 AM, Grant wrote:
> I was planning to back up my Bitcoin wallet (private key) along with
> the rest of my system backups which are versioned by rdiff-backup.
> However, it occurred to me that if the password with which my wallet
> is encrypted is deemed non-secure at some point and I change that
> password, the rdiff-backup repository will still contain the private
> key encrypted with the non-secure password.
>
> Am I thinking this through correctly?  If so, can I delete all
> versions of a particular file from an rdiff-backup repository?

Your thinking is correct.  However if the following criteria are met, 
you can tell rdiff-backup to trim older increments and it will only 
affect your bitcoin wallet file:

- The bitcoin wallet file must be excluded from all other backups.

- You setup a dedicated rdiff-backup destination directory that only 
backs up the bitcoin wallet.

In rdiff-backup, the target directory is an all-or-nothing affair when 
it comes time to age out old increments.  You can't tell rdiff-backup to 
only age out parts of a target directory.

See:

rdiff-backup --list-increments (destination directory)
rdiff-backup --remove-older-than (time interval) (destination)

When setting up rdiff-backup, a good idea is to think about how long you 
want to keep a particular set of files.  If you find that some file sets 
need different retention times then other file sets, then those file 
sets should be placed into a separate rdiff-backup target directory and 
backed up with a separate rdiff-backup command.

At a minimum, I suggest:

- One rdiff-backup job for the main file system, but which excludes all 
user-created data.

- One for /etc and one for /usr/local, with a very long retention 
period.  That's only if you don't use a tool like FSVS or some other 
version control tool on your /etc and /usr/local directories.

- One for /home, maybe even separate backup jobs for each user directory 
under /home.

- One job for each type of user-created data.  For instance, we store 
our SVN repository backups separate from everything else.  And our Samba 
file shares are broken out to their own rdiff-backup target directories 
as well.  The PostgreSQL daily database dumps get written to a separate 
rdiff-backup target directory.