Backups!

[ciphergoth]

Further to my last post about backups, it looks like someone has written the backup tool that I wanted to exist:

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

• All cleverness is on the client - the server can be a dumb store like Amazon S3
• Backups are therefore initiated on the client - good for sometimes-on machines
• Backups can be encrypted and signed with GPG
• It supports incremental backups of large files, using rdiff "signature files"
• All in Python, appears quite new

Support for non-Linux systems seems to be pretty weak at the moment, but I don't see anything that would make it inherently hard except possibly the use of "tar" as a container.

Thoughts?

Comments

[skx.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

I've seen it documented but so far its about the only backup system I've not used.

Right now I'm running backuppc, and rsnapshot on my systems.

The attraction of rsnapshot is that it uses hardlinks + rsync so space usage is minimal.

The attraction of backuppc is that it merges identical files on different hosts - so it requires even less disk space. (e.g. I'm backing up 10 Debian etch systems, so I have ten identical copies of /bin/ls - backuppc will notice that and only store one copy on disk :)

Duplicity looks very nice because of the encryption, but once I've seen the space-saving the backuppc achieves it is hard to move away from. (It uses hashes of file contents - so sticking in encryption would break it.)

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I've never tried duplicity, but I note the encryption is optional, and much of the lack of space-saving techniques is an artefact of the choice of tar as a target format (there's a paper on this subject on the site).