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

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

I've noted in the past that since the rysnc algorithm doesn't need to actually be able to compute the signatures at the remote end - it just needs to know them.

So if the signatures are sent with an encrypted block, you could easily do encrypted backups, with the all the advantages of rsync.

And if you included a hash strong enough in your signature you could share blocks too, giving you the space advantage of backuppc.

The only downside is the block boundaries are fixed on the first backup which make intelligent choice of blocksize critical.