[Duplicity-talk] Backup recovery downloads all signatures

[Romain Thouvenin]

Hello,

Since July last year, I perform nightly backups on a server which are
encrypted and sent to a NAS with rsync. The script requires a full
back-up every 3M, the duplicity command looks like this:

duplicity --name $BACKUP_NAME --encrypt-sign-key $KEY_ID
    --include-filelist $tmplist --full-if-older-than $FULL_EVERY
    / $DESTINATION

Today I had to recover a couple of files (from another machine), which I
did with this command:

duplicity --encrypt-sign-key $KEY_ID --file-to-restore etc/systemd
    $DESTINATION /root/backup

When running this command, I noticed that duplicity seems to download
all the signatures since the first backup. Below you can see an extract
of the output.

Why is that? I had understood that one reason for doing regular full
backups what precisely to avoid this. Downloading all these signatures
takes ages. Am I missing something?

Thanks for your help,
Romain

*OUTPUT EXTRACT:*

Copying duplicity-full-signatures.20170725T131721Z.sigtar.gpg to local
cache.
Copying duplicity-full-signatures.20171024T031102Z.sigtar.gpg to local
cache.
Copying duplicity-full-signatures.20180122T041102Z.sigtar.gpg to local
cache.
Copying duplicity-full-signatures.20180423T031102Z.sigtar.gpg to local
cache.
Copying duplicity-full.20170725T131721Z.manifest.gpg to local cache.
Copying duplicity-full.20171024T031102Z.manifest.gpg to local cache.
Copying duplicity-full.20180122T041102Z.manifest.gpg to local cache.
Copying duplicity-full.20180423T031102Z.manifest.gpg to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20170725T131721Z.to.20170726T031101Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20170726T031101Z.to.20170727T031101Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20170727T031101Z.to.20170728T031101Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.

[../..]

Copying duplicity-inc.20180628T031102Z.to.20180629T031102Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20180629T031102Z.to.20180630T031103Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20180630T031103Z.to.20180701T031102Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying duplicity-inc.20180701T031102Z.to.20180702T031102Z.manifest.gpg
to local cache.
Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20170725T131721Z.to.20170726T031101Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.
Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20170726T031101Z.to.20170727T031101Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.
Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20170727T031101Z.to.20170728T031101Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.

[../..]

Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20180629T031102Z.to.20180630T031103Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.
Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20180630T031103Z.to.20180701T031102Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.
Copying
duplicity-new-signatures.20180701T031102Z.to.20180702T031102Z.sigtar.gpg
to local cache.
Warning, found incomplete backup sets, probably left from aborted session
Last full backup date: Mon Apr 23 05:11:02 2018