Re: [Duplicity-talk] Question on dealing with Archives

[Aaron]

Hello Jeffrey,

 

On 2017-06-07 23:45, Jeffrey wrote:

Aaron, 

 

My first statement falls short of explaining everything I'm looking to do.  Both incremental, and occasional full backups.  Right now I've got Duplicity set (I think) to do daily incremental backups, which is great. And also a full backup every 14 days.  [...]

 

My knowledge is weak when it comes to server admin so without something like Duplicity I don't know how to make that happen.  

 

 

Okay, so breaking this down you essentially have a couple of conceptual options:

1) Use a tool like duplicity to do backups and restores. If you backup various websites to different target folders (full or incremental) that should work well. If you need to restore, you should do that through duplicity and it should all work well. You can check out the manual or ask if you are struggling to make a restore work, but you really should test it out before you need it. The problem with this for your use case is that if you are wanting to restore to a variety of platforms/devices etc while you are travelling, you likely will not have duplicity installed and will struggle to restore what you want -- even if we did offer a command to generate a tar.gz from a particular restore point, you would not have duplicity installed on your phone to create that tar.gz.

 

2) Use a standard tool to just compress the files into a format that you can extract on all the devices you need support for, essentially zipping them up (in Windows terminology) and then put those files somewhere you can access them (say Amazon, or Dropbox/Google Cloud etc). Do not worry about being new to server admin, we all started somewhere. Something like askubuntu is a good place to ask about these more generic tasks.

 

You are really going to struggle to do both with the same archives. If you are doing 2, it cannot really do the incremental backup etc. If you are doing 1, it is much easier to use the same tool you used for backup to do the restore. You could easily do both separately if you are happy to use twice the storage: use duplicity as your primary backup system with all the incremental versions available; and directly compressing up files to archives you can open easily on a regular basis for those emergency "access from a phone in distant country" moments.

Kind regards,

Aaron

blocked.gif
Description: GIF image