The rsync.net Windows Backup Agent has powerful optional features that can easily enable both compression and encryption of your remotely stored files.

These methods DO NOT affect the local copies of your files - your local copies will remain just as they are. Turning on one or both of these options will only change the format that the remote copies are stored in.

Further, it should be noted that while you do gain the respective benefits of space savings and/or security on your remote files, you do lose a small amount of flexibility as browsing your remote filesystem (over sftp, perhaps) and fetching individual files becomes slightly more complicated (since they are now either compressed or encrypted, or both).

Enabling Compression of Your Offsite Files

First, set up your backup profile completely, as described here. Then, from the main menu of the Backup Agent, click on "Advanced Mode" in the upper left-hand corner of the Backup Agent start screen.

In advanced mode, click ONCE on the profile in question to highlight it, and then click the "edit" button in the top toolbar (denoted with a pad and pencil icon).

On the bottom half of the resulting window, under "Advanced Settings" choose the "Zip / Encryption" choice. Under the Zipping tab, select the very first option "Zip Each File Individually (when copying left to right)".

Selecting just that option in the Zipping tab is the simplest choice and the easiest to operate with. Each of your files that you send will be individually zipped (compressed) as they are stored on the remote filesystem.

NOTE: Your backup will take longer to run because compressing your files is a computationally expensive option. Further, if your source files are mostly image or movie files, such as JPEG and MPEG files, enabling compression will have no benefit as those filetypes are already heavily compressed on their own. Do not enable Zipping for a dataset predominately composed of such files.

Enabling Encryption of Your Offsite Files

First, set up your backup profile completely, as described here. Then, from the main menu of the Backup Agent, click on "Advanced Mode" in the upper left-hand corner of the Backup Agent start screen.

In advanced mode, click ONCE on the profile in question to highlight it, and then click the "edit" button in the top toolbar (denoted with a pad and pencil icon).

On the bottom half of the resulting window, under "Advanced Settings" choose the "Zip / Encryption" choice. Under the Encryption tab, select the very first option "Encrypt Files Copied Left to Right". It is recommended that the encryption type be left at the default of "ZIP-Compatible AES (256 bit)".

Next, type in and confirm a password for this encryption.

NOTE: Your backup will take longer to run because encrypting files is a computationally expensive option.

Other Encryption Options

While enabling the encryption option in the rsync.net Windows Backup Agent may be the simplest way to encrypt your offsite files as they are transferred, it is possible that you require an encrypted filesystem or a more flexible option that does not require our particular software (or requires other software that you already standardize on in your organization).

Because of our open, standard filesystem, you can easily transfer any file you choose to - for instance, files encrypted with other encryption software such as PGP or GPG. In addition, alternatives like duplicity can be run on Windows (via Windows python and cygwin).

Finally, your rsync.net filesystem is uniquely well suited as a host for TrueCrypt encrypted filesystems.

Please feel free to contact technical support at any time for help implementing any of these measured - we are very interested in supporting encryption and privacy for our customers in any way that we can.