Re: [Duplicity-talk] Meaning of chains, why do I have old backups still and how can I see inside a backup

[Kenneth Loafman]

Hi Maurice,

A backup chain is the full backup and the incremental backups that follow.  It's called a chain because files in the incrementals chain from full to inc to inc... and so on.  For example, you may have a file that gets updated periodically.  The full backup would contain the full file.  Each incremental would have only the chunk that was changed.  You could have many files like this and duplicity will happily manage them.  When you do a new full backup, you start a new primary chain and the others become secondary.

As to the 45 days, duplicity will not delete the chain until the entire chain is 45 days old, so 45 days from the last incremental in that chain.

...Thanks,

...Ken

On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 3:46 PM Maurice R Volaski via Duplicity-talk <duplicity-talk@nongnu.org> wrote:

A pretty simple question to start but is the meaning of “primary” and “secondary” chains? How does one get created over the other? Why are there two secondary chains? It seems a chain is created every time there is a full backup initiated.

 

I have

Secondary chain 1 of 2:

-------------------------

Chain start time: Sun Aug 16 03:28:32 2020

Chain end time: Tue Sep 15 03:27:29 2020

 

Secondary chain 2 of 2:

-------------------------

Chain start time: Wed Sep 16 03:25:31 2020

Chain end time: Fri Oct 16 03:25:11 2020

Number of contained backup sets: 31

Total number of contained volumes: 57

 

Found primary backup chain with matching signature chain:

-------------------------

Chain start time: Sat Oct 17 03:27:25 2020

Chain end time: Fri Oct 23 03:24:26 2020

Number of contained backup sets: 7

Total number of contained volumes: 33

 

Looking at the dates of all of these, it seems they’re all in chronological order, but I still don’t understand the logic of how it’s classifying them.

 

Here’s a section of my script

/usr/bin/duplicity remove-older-than 45D --force b2://${b2_keyid}:${b2_applicationkey}@einsteinmedneuroscience/${rootFolder}

 

# Perform the backup, make a full backup if it's been over 30 days

/usr/bin/duplicity --include-filelist ${fileList} --full-if-older-than 30D / b2://${b2_keyid}:${b2_applicationkey}@einsteinmedneuroscience/${rootFolder}

 

So it should be deleting backups over 45 days old and it doesn’t seem to be. The first chain started on August 16, which is more than 45 days ago.

 

Finally, is there a way I can see what files are contained in an incremental or full backup?

 

 

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