Re: [Duplicity-talk] duplicity fails to do incremental backups on Ubuntu Feisty

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Saturday 24 February 2007 09:33:05 Michael Baierl wrote:
> Bad to say there are no alternatives out there - a tool that encrypts
> backups, does not waste bandwidth, creates small backup files, does
> incremental backups.... and ideally works with Windows and Linux :)

I would say the problem it is trying to solve IS really hard (which is kinda 
supported by the fact that I don't know of any other tool doing it, either). 
Basically you have to generate binary patches against older version you don't 
actually have access to...

I wonder if perhaps this is asking too much. As much I hate to say it, but not 
even rdiff-backup really works reliably for me, even that one would 
occasionally do full backups for no apparent reason. I've gone back to plain 
rsync in that case.

Maybe, at the price of more bandwidth and storage consumption, but gaining 
more resiliency, one should simply store each changed file in an incremental 
set. That means you can basically work with gpg and whatever transport you 
chose and don't have to mess with rsync signatures (which while being a very 
creative approach, probably is not what they really were intended to be used 
for). All you need is an always updated list of the version of files you have 
already stored on the backup machine...

A similar approach would be to use a crypt filesystem (that encrypts 
individual files) on the client and just run rsync on the encrypted files, 
but I rather stick to using LUKS on my laptop. And using rsync on a LUKS 
DEVICE would perhaps work, but take forever on most pipes. And it most 
certainly isnt efficient in any way.

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