Re: [Duplicity-talk] Very promising software!

[Kenneth Loafman]

Duane Winner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Just started tooling around w/ duplicity in conjunction w/ rsync.net, 
> and so far, I have to say...wow.

Thanks from all of us!

> I can easily see the possibilities of using duplicty and rsync.net (or 
> S3, haven't looked at that yet) as a of supplanting off-site tape 
> backups here, since they haven't been working out so well, since we are 
> such a small operation with a shortage of manpower.

Shameless plug for rsync.net - I use them to back up my critical files, 
the ones that just plain have to be off site in case of a site disaster. 
 They have great tech support and will help you get your stuff going.

> But I trust it when it comes from the horse's mouth, and when I read on 
> the main page of duplicity.org that it is still not stable, and not 
> recommend for business support yet, well, I won't argue with that 
> statement. But I can't help but wonder why? What are the most 
> outstanding issues right now? Granted, I've only done some very 
> rudimentary test so far on small data sets, but so far, I am please with 
> what I see. So what are the big gotcha's?

The original author, Ben Escoto, and I are probably very conservative 
when it comes to saying software is good.  I'm shooting for stability in 
the 0.4.3 version and I think we'll make it there in a little while. 
Even though its Beta, its more stable than some high-dollar commercial 
software I had to use a few years ago.  It's all relative.

I've been using the 0.4.1 and 0.4.2 versions for a long time with no 
real problems.  There were some problems with error handling and error 
messages, but those are getting ironed out.  The biggest set of 
problems, and the largest amount of work, has gone into FTP handling. 
dAniel hAhler has submitted a number of patches to help correct those 
problems, and I think its mostly there.

Big gotcha's - error handling - right now it will retry a number of 
times before giving up, but you have to clean up and restart the backup 
if it fails.  I don't think that issue will be resolved soon, but if you 
split your backups up into 'reasonable' chunks, restarting becomes less 
of a problem.  I've rarely had a failed backup.  YMMV.

...Ken