decryption. Unless you have very specific requirements for your backups you probably won't need this functionality; for most backups symmetric encryption is best. To encrypt with GPG in symmetric mode, use commands similar to the following example: Note how we obfuscate the location of the key file from the running command line, that users would be able to see with the ps command, by reading it in through file descriptor 3. Encryption with Amanda Amanda is one of the best open-source backup management packages available. It is very flexible, scalable, and very easy to customise and extend. The latest version (I used Amanda 2.5.1) has extensions and plugins to perform encryption with either the client or the server doing the hard work of encrypting the data. Assuming you've already got Amanda installed and setup to run your backups, adding encryption for backups (... and decryption for restores) is very easy to do. On the Amanda server, configure a dumptype in /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf (DailySet1 is the name for the backup set) to include an encryption plugin: The options are quite self-explanatory. This specifies that the backup set will use encryption and that encryption will be performed on the client system using /usr/sbin/amcrypt-ossl which is a simple shell script calling upon openssl to perform the encryption. Encryption is also performed on the client using the same script but with the "-d" option added. Also on the Amanda server, change the dumptype for the directory on the client to be backed up, in /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist: