Re: [Duplicity-talk] A few Q's about duplicity compared rsync

[Pedro Ribeiro]

Thanks for the response, it is much clearer now.

So how much pain is it to restore a full incremental backup going up
to a year? Let's say the base is 150GB, and the variance about 1GB a
month.
Doing more than one full backup a year is painful, it takes me about 4
days to upload all the stuff into Google Cloud.

Regards,
Pedro

On 26 December 2013 16:07, Will McCown <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 12/25/2013 5:46 PM, Pedro Ribeiro wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm a long time rsync user which has just started using duplicity for
>> encrypted remote backups to Google Cloud.
>> There are a few questions for which I couldn't get an answer in the
>> docs, or maybe my understanding of duplicity is wrong.
>>
>> - I only backup my home directory with incremental rsync backups. Is
>> there a reason for not doing a full backup once with duplicity and
>> then incremental forever? The docs are a bit ambiguous about this, and
>> reading around the web it seems some people are keen on doing full
>> backups every now and then. Is there really a necessity (some kind of
>> bit / backup rot)?
>
> It comes down to how much pain you are willing to deal with if
> you should ever have to do a full restore, since a restore will
> require reading the full backup plus every incremental done since.
> The docs are ambiguous about this because the best choice
> depends strongly on how much the data being backed up is changing.
> For my own use (which is primarily my email folders) I do daily
> backups with "--full-if-older-than 1M".  I also periodically run
> the "remove-all-inc-of-but-n-full 2" command on my backup to clean out
> the incremental backups on the older sets.
>
>> - I used to run rsync with the --delete option. This would mean that
>> if a file in the backup target had been deleted / wasn't present in
>> the backup source, it would get deleted. Does duplicity does the same
>> thing automatically, or should I be passing "--delete" to
>> --rsync-options?
>
> There is no equivalent to "--delete", the deleted file will remain
> in the backup until you decide to do a new full backup and remove
> the old full and incremental backups.  In planning your backup strategy
> keep in mind that files do sometimes get accidentally deleted, and
> I know I've done it and not noticed the file missing for weeks or
> months.
>
> If you are used to using the rsync "--link-dest=" flag to create
> time machine style snapshots of your home directory, you need to
> understand that duplicity works quite differently.
>
> --
> Will McCown, Rolling Hills Estates, CA
> address@hidden
>
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