Re: [Duplicity-talk] Create full backup from incremental

[Ulrik Rasmussen]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:00:00 +0200
address@hidden wrote:

> On 15.04.2015 09:54, Ulrik Rasmussen wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I just started using duplicity for backing up my work to a VPS. It
> > is my understanding that it is wise to do a full backup about once a
> > month, to enable deletion of old backups and faster restoration.
> > However, when doing a full backup, duplicity seems to transfer
> > everything over the wire again, which takes a long time if I'm on a
> > slow connection and also costs me bandwidth. Since the server
> > already has all my data, this really shouldn't be necessary.
> > 
> > Is there a way to do a full backup on the server side? More
> > precisely, can I tell duplicity to create a new backup chain based
> > on the contents of the current chain?
> > 
> 
> no.
> 
> duplicity deals with "dumb" backends and solely uses them for file
> storage. for this design to create a synthetic full you would have to
> transfer the whole data over the line again anyway completely.
> 
> however, it'd be possible to implement that for the rare cases that
> users have shell access to their backends and can have a duplicity
> instance running locally there. 
> 
> see also
>  https://answers.launchpad.net/duplicity/+question/257348
> 
> ..ede/duply.net

I see, thanks for clarifying. That makes sense, considering most
backends don't imply shell access. Since I _do_ have shell access to the
server and plenty of disk storage, I guess I can accomplish the task by
just restoring the incremental backup on the server and doing a full
backup from that using the file system backend.

/Ulrik