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

[Michael Lissner]

Michael Terry wrote on 09/06/2009 08:14 PM:
> 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 Are these tutorials just outdated, or am I missing something?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.
>   
OK. It seems like using a key might be a bad idea, since it would likely
get lost during a major crash. Symmetric encryption sounds like a good
way to go.
>   
>> 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.
>   
Gotcha. Is there a point when not doing a full backup would start
bogging down something doing diffs, or something like that?
>   
>> 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.
>   
This makes me wonder, then, why it's not documented that clean should be
run after each backup, or why it doesn't happen automatically.
>   
>> 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.
>   
Naturally, I'm running code from the v5 branch...installing your PPA
now....thanks for all the help.
> -mt
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Duplicity-talk mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/duplicity-talk
>