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

[lovingboth]

The downside for me would be the need to have significant spare space locally.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

duplicity can use remote as well as local targets, including support for Amazon S3. It's possible I'm misunderstanding you though?

[lovingboth]

From the FAQ:

"Duplicity may require lots of temp space sometimes, depending on the size of the volumes created..."

I'm guessing that you could arrange to have that remotely, albeit at a cost in time and possibly money.

But I know how every OS I have ever run behaves when its file systems approach or reach fullness. (Ubuntu has improved greatly, for example.) Having a reasonable speed net connection combined with no quota doesn't help. It is, in part, an addiction: there is so much good stuff out there, and I wants it my precious...

This has been one of the reasons I like what I have for Windows - it uses a delightfully small amount of local disk space.