Re: [Duplicity-talk] Some questions from a new user

[Michael Terry]

2009/9/6 Michael Lissner <address@hidden>:
> As I'm looking at tutorials online, it seems like a lot of them instruct
> people to make gpg keys, and to give arguments to duplicity to use those
> keys. But when I look at the man page, and documentation, it seems like
> that's not necessary, and that duplicity handles encryption for me by
> default. Are these tutorials just outdated, or am I missing something?
> If it does handle the encryption for me, can somebody comment on what
> encryption is used, or if this is an option that can be adjusted still?

Duplicity uses "GPG symmetric encryption" by default, where it
encrypts with a password.  You can optionally give it a GPG key to
encrypt with, but you don't need to.

> The second question I'm having is that I have about 40GB of personal
> files I'm backing up. A lot of the tutorials online are saying that I
> should do a full backup every month or so, but if that means
> transferring 40GB over my network every month, then duplicity won't work
> out for me. Is there a way that I can keep a month's worth of backups
> around without ever having to do a full backup, and without backups
> filling my  remote server's HD?

You can go longer than a month without doing a full backup.  It's a
matter of risk tradeoff -- the more full backups you have, the more
protected you are if any volume "goes bad" (i.e. hard drive problem)
or is deleted.  But they take up more space.

> I'm also wondering what effect running the clean (--force) command would
> have if it were run after every backup? It seems like a good practice
> just to keep things tidy, but it seems like nobody is recommending it.

Wouldn't hurt.  But I believe duplicity will only leave files around
if it was interrupted and you don't intend to resume (see below) or if
something went wrong.

> Finally, does anybody know what happens if a backup gets interrupted in
> the middle? Since the 40GB of data is going to take a long time to
> backup, it'd be great if I could do it over a number of days while
> turning my laptop on and off. Rsnapshot supports this, I believe, but
> from what I can tell, it seems that duplicity does not.

Since version 6.0.0, it will resume from interruption on the next run.

-mt