Session/Encryption passwords. Use or not?

[crodrigues]

Hey guys,

I'm just trying to figure out all the PROs and CONs if using passwords for the session and if I encrypt the backup jobs.

Can anyone list some PROs/CONs or point me to a decent website explaining this in more detail? The CA website is terrible for such kind of information...

Thanks in advance!! Cláudio Rodrigues
Microsoft MVP
Windows 2000/NT Server - Terminal Services

http://www.terminal-services.net

 

[tbeeber]

Session Encryption Passwords should only be used if you have a need for the data to be encrypted on the tape. For example, if there is sensitive data, and you are not sure of the security of the transport of your tapes to offsite storage. We were looking into it for possible security compliance issues.

The drawbacks are in both time and tape used.

Encrypting your data adds time to the backup process. Exactly how much depends on your processor speed, memory on the backup server, and other variables, but I've seen it add 50% to 100% to backup times. If your backup server is also running any other applications or serving files, expect to take a big processor hit while the backup is running.

Encrypted data does not compress well, so you will lose just about all of the advantage of hardware compression on your tape drive. That means if, for example, you are using a 35/70 DLT drive for your backups, only expect to get 35 GB onto each tape. In my benchmarks, I've seen compression ratios reported between 1.00 and 1.03, hardly worth the effort.

I have not tried specifying a session password without selecting encryption. I'm not sure what that will do, I suspect just require you to specify a password before running a restore job. But if it does anything, it would likely just keep out the casual snoop, but a dedicated hacker could still pull the data off the tape without too much difficulty, since it would still be plaintext.

You may want to run a few quick benchmarks to find out what your hit will be in your own environment.

 

[mbravo]

Does any one of you which encryption method uses ARCserve ???

Thanks in Advance.

Martin.