Adding headless capabilities to the Tresorit backup software using Xpra / Winswitch in Linux

Recently I have changed my backup solution from SpiderOak to Tresorit. I have been very happy with SpiderOak since I started with them around 2009, But last year backups and sync started to fail. Eg: backups taking ages or not finishing at all, etc. Also support response time was not good enough and didn’t find a proper fix for my problems, so finally I decided to move my business elsewhere. The chosen one was Tresorit, a Swiss based company that offered two things important for me de-duplication and client side encryption.

Both solutions works in Linux but Tresorit needs a GUI to work (SpiderOak support a headless mode). This was a problem as I wanted to run the Tresorit client in a headless VPS servers. To add a kind of pseudo headless support to the Tresorit client I decided to use the Xpra software a multi-platform (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac) screen and application forwarding system or as they say in the web page “screen for X11”.
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Backing up a cpanel hosting account

Since 2005 I have hosted this web page in the Cpanel based Bluehost company. First with Joomla and recently migrated to WordPress.

Bluehost allows to download a daily, weekly and monthly backup from your Cpanel control panel, but manual intervention is needed:

  1. Logon in the control panel
  2. Navigate to the backup page
  3. Perform the backup
  4. Download it to your local computer.

This is a manually/time consuming task and of course you should not forget it!!

In this post I gonna show my automatic method to backup files and databases using:

  1. Crontab for automatic backups.
  2. Public/private keys for passwordless ssh connections.
  3. Rsync command for synchronizing directories between remote and local servers. This way bandwidth is reduced as if a file has already been copied to the local server no data transfer is needed.
  4. Mysqldump for dumping the MySQL databases to a local file.
  5. SpiderOak for data deduplication and remote backup.

Some previous knowledge is needed to understand how it works, anyway there are some useful links to understand it. 🙂

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