gorgon.crypt.gen.nz /home client-encrypt-ossl This will tell Amanda to use the client-encrypt-ossl when backing up /home on the backup client system gorgon.crypt.gen.nz. On the client to be backed up, check that /usr/sbin/amcrypt-ossl is installed (it comes with Amanda v2.5 releases), and then configure an encryption key, or passphrase, for the backup: Naturally, you should make up your own key to put into the .am_passphrase file, and remember to store a copy in a safe place. Now you're ready to run the backup. Check that everything is fine on the server: to perform the backup with encryption. The results will be emailed to the administrator specified in /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf. Whenever you change your backups, always test that it is working. In the case of setting up encryption you need to test that the data on tape is actually encrypted, and make sure that you can read it back as well! You can change the cipher used for encryption by editing the encryption script /usr/sbin/amcrypt-ossl on the Amanda client system, the standard release uses aes-256-cbc which will be fine for most purposes. Which algorithm? It is important to choose the encryption algorithm, or cipher, carefully. Some commercial backup systems may not have the option to choose the cipher, but with OpenSSL there is a big choice of algorithms to choose from. The version of OpenSSL I used for testing (v0.9.8a) supports all of these: GPG supports a smaller range of ciphers, version 1.4.2 supports the following: 3des, cast5, blowfish, aes, aes192, aes256, twofish I