So since I've been thinking about a new solution for our clients, I decided to go ahead and try it out for our data. I've been googling affordable cloud based storage for a while and found a company onlinestoragesolutions.com, the pricing is very reasonable US$45 for 2 years currently, with unlimited everything. There are a few review sites that seem to throw some cold water over the offer, but I had one client sign up without any major issues (for another reason), so at that price I though let's give it a go....

One of the key features they advertise is rsync, which since we run all linux machines would be ideal. However after paying, and getting access, I realized it's not quite a simple as pointing your rsync at their server. You need to set up an ssh tunnel to route rsync through.

Can't be that difficult I thought.... Turns out that setting up a password based ssh tunnel, automatically on a cron job, is no small task, there are questions all over stackexchange and various forums, none that I saw managed to find a solution. Most of the suggestions are based around the 'expect' program, a usefull unix tool which can be used to script ssh access. The problem in this case was that setting up the tunnel, then doing the rsync, and then closing the tunnel is not something that a bash, expect or any other method I found could do easily if at all.

So almost at the point of giving up, I started looking around at php's popen (which would not work either), and fell over the pecl expect extension. 

Below is the result of a few minutes coding, which does exactly what is needed, and can be run directly from cron. Feel free to escape from overpriced backup solutions..