Backing up and encryption with GPG 4777

Well I've tried on my home system or a dry run. Using GPG's symmetric encryption on a file system of about 3.8 GB produces an encrypted file of about 1.8 GB (about half the size). This is mentioned in the GPG man page and I am using the default level of compression.

I think some sort of security on an external HD is required so I think this symmetric encryption using the root's pbuttphrase is a good compromise.

I see the root (or wheel members) having to know the pbuttphrase is no extra hardship in terms of restoring the backup and the security on the external HD which probably can not be made physically secure enough in most user environments.

Doing user-by-user backups is probably preferred with CPIO or BRU as suggested by posters.

This call to GPG to do the encryption can be made into a script and placed in cron.hourly with permissions set so that only root can read the file which at least currently with GPG would have the pbuttphrase appearing there or in a file (see gpg's --pbuttphrase-fd option)

Something like that sounds like the best compromise for a large number of settings -- especially academic and other settings where increasingly bold computer theft has become an epidemic.

Best,