[Duplicity-talk] Announcing Déjà Dup

[Michael Terry]

Hello, gentle duplicity developers and users!  First, thanks so much
for duplicity.  It's a very helpful program.

I've been working on the beginnings of a frontend for duplicity.
Today I released my first version, and invite you all to try it out,
and help out if so inclined.  See http://launchpad.net/deja-dup for
code/tarballs.

It doesn't try to offer 1:1 features with duplicity, but is aimed at
making backing up the "right way" (off-site, encrypted, and regular)
as easy as possible.  It's written using GTK+/GNOME libraries and in
the Vala language (http://live.gnome.org/Vala).

I hope to be a useful member of the duplicity community.  Towards that
end, I seek advice and have some.  :)

First, what are some common best practices?

For example, I saw on the list a while back, that it's not encouraged
to forever do incremental backups, that you should occasionally make a
fresh full backup.  Why?

What sort of files should never be backed up?  Like, should my
frontend try to stop the user from backing up /dev?


I have some changes in duplicity that would make the life of a
frontend writer much easier.  How interested are duplicity developers
in the following changes?

* Progress feedback.  Does duplicity offer any sort of feedback like
"backing up XXX... 45 of 13530 files"?  Pumping such information to
stdout or stderr in either text or in some binary format would let my
frontend give the user much more useful feedback (right now it just
uses a 'pulsing' progress bar).

* Errors.  Right now duplicity always exits with the value 1 on error.
 It would help me a lot if there were a separate error code for each
error.  That way I could notice that, say, duplicity errored out
because of a source mismatch and offer a dialog with buttons like
"Ignore" and "Cancel" and rerun duplicity if needed.  Right now, I can
only throw up a dialog with the error text and there's no way for the
user to rerun with the right --allow-source-mismatch flag.  I could
try to parse the stderr output, but that is very error prone.  An exit
value would be much more useful.


Thanks!  I hope you all find Déjà Dup useful!
-mt