[new tech guy]

Hello all,
I have a small question about making off site backups to an ftp. I have a good service (thanks again speakersrock for space on your servers) that i use for off site backup. I have the system set up using batch files which utilitze the command line version of winrar to download files from my local NAS and rar them into an archive that is then uploaded to the server. This system seems to work fine, however, i would just like to know if the method i have for security is sufficient. Right now i have it set with -hp switch for password protection. I assume it is winrar's 128bit AES security but i have read that the password can be discovered by digging through the noise that the password protection creates in the rar. What i want to know is if this simple thing is sufficient in terms of security. The pc i have doing it is protected as well as it is run off of a pc with an always on account set with a very short screensaver/screenlock time. That way the machine will always be at a logon screen (account needs to be on because of windows scheduling issues). But in any event, is what im doing now plenty secure against any hacking or should i tighten security up more with an application like truecrypt? I believe the ftp is just plain authentication without ssl. Any advice would be appreciated.

[The_JinJ]

Like you said ftp has no encryption - can you use sftp instead? I like Truecrypt, could use it to encrypt and also use the keyfile option to double up protection.....
Suppose it depends on what's in those archives and how well they need to be hidden

[new tech guy]

Well mainly its just family stuff, family photos, documents..etc. I never tried sftp and dont want to make it more complicated. If im correct however, and winrar uses AES 128bit by default, it would take a good deal of work to hack. So i guess winrar's is good enough then?

[lunarlander]

The weakness is the script which is plain text - containing your winrar passsword and perhaps ftp password. Making it an exe would be better. So in case your account is compromised, they won't know anything about your backup.

[new tech guy]

I was aware of that lunarlander. I will say i dont think i helped things by putting into the root directory of the C: drive. Really its a main script that launches a bunch of smaller scripts. Is there any converter that can convert my script into a .exe or some other executable? I think i have heard that .COM would work too but i would need a converter. Finally, the final weakness is that the network directories are mapped. I could have used just the plain // in rar but i found it easer to map however, the NAS requires authentication. But i always need to have read only access on the account so the batch can pool data.

[lunarlander]

I found this when I googled for 'batch file compiler'

http://www.abyssmedia.com/quickbfc/

[new tech guy]

The problem is when i googled this, alot of the hits i forgot to mention they would set avg off at some point. I just block everything so i dont take a chance. I will look into that though.