Re: [Duplicity-talk] Duplicity feature suggestions

[Jan Rychter]

Kenneth Loafman:
> Jan Rychter wrote:
> > [reposting directly to the list, as it seems postings sent via Gmane
> >  disappear into a black hole somewhere...]
> > 
> > I've been using duplicity for a while now, having first tried it about a
> > year ago and having recently come back to it. Here is a brief wishlist
> > of features that would make it work much better for me. Hopefully
> > someone will find this useful.
> > 
> > -- Store local copies of manifests and signature files. These files do
> >    not change and their size still makes it acceptable to cache them
> >    locally. It would speed the backup process immensely if I could tell
> >    duplicity to just keep them stored locally as well, and only download
> >    from the server when the local copies are missing.
> > 
> > -- Provide some way to recover from an aborted first backup, or provide
> >    a way to do this first backup in stages. I have a 50GB filesystem I
> >    need to backup and 50GB of space on another continent where I'd like
> >    this data to land. I can't use duplicity for that. There is simply no
> >    way to do the first backup without it being interrupted by something
> >    -- a network glitch, usually. As it stands now, I simply cannot
> >    backup that data.
> > 
> > Other than that duplicity works very well for me (for smaller backups)!
> > 
> > --J.
> 
> I stage large backups to a local system, then have that system  rsync
> the local to the remote.  That will give you a local copy for fast
> restore and a remote backup for site disasters.
> 
> Disk space is cheap enough that you could keep a 50GB weekly backup and
> daily incrementals on a single drive.

Sorry, that's not an acceptable workaround. What if I have 200GB to
backup and no way to plug in another drive locally?

As a side note, I was actually amazed at the scarcity of remote backup
solutions for Linux. There is a huge rsync crowd that when asked about
encryption shouts "you don't need encryption! you should have trusted
remote backup space!". There is another crowd that says "you don't need
remote backup at all, just plug in more local drives". Duplicity stands
out as one of the best solutions out there -- but it isn't quite there
yet.

--J.