What is the benefit of using RSA encryption vs standard encryption?

#1

I’m learning how to use Duplicacy CLI and having success with my testing. I wanted to try encryption so jumped right to RSA, generated a key pair, and successfully restored.

  1. What is the benefit of using RSA vs standard encryption?
  2. The documentation states that the key needs to be passwordless, but on MacOS I was unable to generate one without a password (an error was returned when no password was provided).

Thanks

1 Like
#2

The standard encryption is symmetric – you need to the same password to backup and to restore.

RSA encryption is asymmetric – you don’t need a key to backup but you do need the private key to restore.

The private key can be encrypted by a passphrase.

#3

The key can (and it’s a good practice for it to) be protected by the passphrase; with this change you can supply the passphrase as the command line argument during restore Duplicacy Web Edition: Add Restore option "-key private.pem"