Hi, On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 22:42, Scott Ehrlich <srehrlich at gmail.com> wrote: > I ONLY plan to use samba to mount the NAS to my Linux server, unless > someone comes up with a more secure method, I don't know if I understand what you mean by the sentence above, but Samba is *not* secure in the sense that nothing is encrypted in that connection. > or even away to negate the > need of the Linux server and permit the hosts to back up directly to > the NAS... > > Ideas are welcome. You mention that you want to use encryption to upload the files to the NAS and for that you would like to use an encrypted protocol (something over SSL or SSH). However, by doing that the files on the NAS side would still be unencrypted, and anyone having access to it would have access to all your backup files (I don't know if that is an important security consideration for you). Another alternative would be using a backup software that would create an encrypted backup image and then upload it to the NAS. That way you may do the upload using an unencrypted protocol (like FTP or CIFS which seem to be the ones that your NAS supports) and even if someone hacks your NAS they would not be able to access your backed up files. One software that does exactly that is Duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ It certainly supports FTP for the upload, I believe it should support Samba as well. HTH, Filipe