[Duplicity-talk] Re: some usage questions regarding full/incremental backups

[Mathijs Kwik]

Just answering my own message since there were so many helpful replies.
Thanks for those.
I think I'll look around a bit more to find some way to encrypt
rdiff-backup's stuff.
I really need the reverse-incremental stuff since transferring the
full backup every x weeks will be heavy on bandwidth.
Also, storage is a bit of an issue.
Even when I remove all-but-1 full before doing full again, it takes
over 2x the 'real' size, which I think is not very nice.

To answer the question/remark about consistency,
I use LVM2 volumes and make a snapshot which I backup.
after that, remove the snapshot again.

Maybe it's useful to mention that - when using mysql - the
snapshotting is wrapped:
FLUSH_TABLES_WITH_READ_LOCK;
\! lvcreate -p r -s -L 10G -n backup_vol my_vg/vol;
UNLOCK_TABLES;

this makes sure databases finish any write-operations (wait for them
to complete, put new ones on hold) before snapshotting.
Using InnoDB tables (MyISAM is still vulnerable) this makes sure all
data is consistent and be restored instantly using the journal.

Thought this might be useful for others.