Re: [Duplicity-talk] Some questions from a new user

[Richard Scott]

>> The second question I'm having is that I have about 40GB of personal
>> files I'm backing up. A lot of the tutorials online are saying that I should 
>> do a full backup
>> every month or so, but if that means transferring 40GB over my network every 
>> month, then
>> duplicity won't work out for me. Is there a way that I can keep a month's 
>> worth of backups around
>> without ever having to do a full backup, and without backups filling my  
>> remote server's HD?
>
> You can go longer than a month without doing a full backup.  It's a
> matter of risk tradeoff -- the more full backups you have, the more protected 
> you are if any volume
> "goes bad" (i.e. hard drive problem)
> or is deleted.  But they take up more space.

Hi, i've an alternative idea on this "long chain" backup problem...

I too don't really want to have to do a full backup each month. However I also 
don't need the
ability to be able to restore a file from x days ago. I'm backing up my email 
server so just
having an off site, secure copy is good enough for me.

Is there a way to delete the available incrementals and just leave the last 
known full backup on
the remote storage? This way my next incremental would be the difference 
between today and the
full backup x days/weeks/months/years ago. This way we'd a) have a short backup 
chain and b) not
need to re-upload the full backup each time we do a full backup?

I know we have the "remove-all-but-n-full" option, but from what I understand 
this also keeps any
associated incremental sets.

Rich