[Duplicity-talk] Frequency of full versus incremental backups?

[Thomas Tuttle]

I've got myself a nice cozy 6 GB filesystem from rsync.net, and I'm
setting up a backup strategy for my personal laptop.  By excluding my
distro's package tree, kernel sources, media files, temp files, and a
bunch of other things I don't need backed up, I got the backup set for
the entire system down to a little over 1 GB.

Here's where it gets difficult: I'd be happy doing very occasional full
backups (every month or two) and keeping incrementals in between, but
I'm concerned that after a month's worth of file changes, it would start
to slow down (since it would have to process the catalogs from every
other backup, right?), and if I ever needed to restore, I'd literally
have to suck down every bit of data it had collected.  On the other
hand, I'd be happy with weekly full backups, because I'd only need to
restore up to a week's worth of changes after I restored the full
backup, but in this case I'd only be able to keep about a month's worth
of data before I risked running out of space.

So, a few questions:

1. Any advice?  I don't have any sort of statistics on how often I
change files, so what kind of behavior can I expect from duplicity?  Is
it better to just pile up incrementals and keep only two full backups
(perhaps the last two months), or is it better to do full backups more
often?

2. Is there a way to do "backup levels", so I can have monthly full
backups, then weekly backups of the changes since the last weekly, and
daily backups of the changes since the last daily?  That way I could
trash the higher-resolution backups without having to restart the whole
chain.

3. Is there a way to cache the catalog files client-side, so at least
when backing up, I don't need to fetch them constantly?

Thanks,

Thomas Tuttle
-- 
Thomas Tuttle - address@hidden - http://www.ttuttle.net/