Re: [Duplicity-talk] Unnecessarily asking for passphrase on incremental backup

[Kenneth Loafman]

Georg Lutz wrote:
> On 2009-04-07 15:55, Kenneth Loafman wrote:
>> Duplicity needs the key to decrypt the remote manifest file, which it
>> then compares to the local manifest to guarantee that the two are in
>> sync.  If you are running a recent release of duplicity, --use-agent is
>> available to allow gpg to query a gpg-agent instead of the user.
>>
> 
> Hi Ken,
> 
> Ok, I understand that this make the data handling much more robust and
> probably fixes another severe bug.
> 
> However this breaks the nice feature that duplicity didn't need access
> to a secret key just for doing backups up to version 0.5.12 . I liked
> it, because the backup should work fully unattended - the concerning
> workstations/servers just had to be switched on at a certain time. Now I
> have to make sure to manually unlock the secret key on every machine to
> let the backup happen. The same issue was recently reported as bug
> #26112.
> 
> Couldn't the data integrity check been done without decrypting the
> remote manifest? The archive-dir could hold e.g. an additional file with
> a checksum for the encrypted remote manifest. What do you think? Would
> this be feasible?

This is a good idea.  If the archive dir had the name and a hash of the
latest manifest gpg file that could be checked and all would be OK.

Taking it a step further, hashes for all of the remote files could be
saved in the archive.  During a restore, it would be nice to know that
the downloaded file had been corrupted.

I'll keep this in mind and get it fixed, at least the first part.

...Ken

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