Re: [Duplicity-talk] Create full backup from incremental

[Scott Hannahs]

Note, that to do this, you need to have unencryption locally on the server.  
Duplicity assumes an insecure server model.  To collapse incremental backups 
onto a full backup means that all your data is compromised to the level of 
security of the remote server.

The duplicity model assumes that once the data goes out over the wire it is 
subject to unknown security.

For any commercial remote storage, you might as well just use a commercial 
backup system without encryption.

-Scott

On Apr 15, 2015, at 07:21, address@hidden wrote:

> On 15.04.2015 12:56, Ulrik Rasmussen wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:00:00 +0200
>> address@hidden wrote:
>> 
>>> On 15.04.2015 09:54, Ulrik Rasmussen wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I just started using duplicity for backing up my work to a VPS. It
>>>> is my understanding that it is wise to do a full backup about once a
>>>> month, to enable deletion of old backups and faster restoration.
>>>> However, when doing a full backup, duplicity seems to transfer
>>>> everything over the wire again, which takes a long time if I'm on a
>>>> slow connection and also costs me bandwidth. Since the server
>>>> already has all my data, this really shouldn't be necessary.
>>>> 
>>>> Is there a way to do a full backup on the server side? More
>>>> precisely, can I tell duplicity to create a new backup chain based
>>>> on the contents of the current chain?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> no.
>>> 
>>> duplicity deals with "dumb" backends and solely uses them for file
>>> storage. for this design to create a synthetic full you would have to
>>> transfer the whole data over the line again anyway completely.
>>> 
>>> however, it'd be possible to implement that for the rare cases that
>>> users have shell access to their backends and can have a duplicity
>>> instance running locally there. 
>>> 
>>> see also
>>> https://answers.launchpad.net/duplicity/+question/257348
>>> 
>>> ..ede/duply.net
>> 
>> I see, thanks for clarifying. That makes sense, considering most
>> backends don't imply shell access. Since I _do_ have shell access to the
>> server and plenty of disk storage, I guess I can accomplish the task by
>> just restoring the incremental backup on the server and doing a full
>> backup from that using the file system backend.
>> 
> 
> right you are.. make sure to have identical users/numeric ids and restore as 
> root, if you want to keep those.
> 
> alternatively you can hackishly "reuse" the old full by copying it and 
> updating the filenames with a proper newer timestamp. depending on your 
> data's turnover you might be doing that for a while until your first 
> incremental grows too big.
> 
> ..ede/duply.net
> 
> 
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