[Duplicity-talk] Using the cloud for backups between backups to an external HDD

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Hello all,

I currently use a couple of external HDDs to back up my personal files, 
which I keep at work. I have always been concerned about losing data if 
something happened in between the times that I bring home a hard drive 
for a backup. Backing up to the cloud always appealed for this reason, 
but I wasn't prepared to pay to store my TB of backups in the cloud.

I came up with the following solution, which I thought may help others. 
In essence I am still primarily backing up to my external HDDs, but am 
backing up to the cloud in between those HDD backups. That way, if 
anything happened between backups, I could supplement the external HDD 
files with those from the cloud and have an up-to-date backup. As it 
happens, I do duply backups to a local HDD first (because I have the 
space) and then rsync it to the external HDDs or, in this case, Ubuntu 
One.

1) Record the date/time after every backup. I have a script that I run 
whenever I plug in my external HDD that runs all my duply backups and 
then rsyncs them to the HDD. I added the following line to the end of 
that script:
date +"%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S" > 
~/Backup/duplicity-scripts/passport-lastrun.txt

2) Install Ubuntu One. That will then keep the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder in 
sync with the cloud.

3) I created a daily cron job that runs a bash script. That bash script 
first runs the duply backups and then does the following:
# Backup any new duply backups since the last HDD backup
find ~/Backup/duply_backups/ -newermt "`cat 
~/Backup/duplicity-scripts/passport-lastrun.txt`" | rsync -a --delete 
--files-from=- / ~/Ubuntu\ One/Backup/duply/

# Delete anything there that is older than the last HDD backup (rsync 
doesn't delete files in the target location if you are using a file 
list)
find ~/Ubuntu\ One/Backup/duply/ -not -newermt "`cat 
~/Backup/duplicity-scripts/passport-lastrun.txt`" -exec rm {} \;

Hope that helps the next person who wants to do the same.

Regards,

Aaron