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

[edgar . soldin]

On 15.04.2015 12:56, Ulrik Rasmussen wrote:
> 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.
> 

right you are.. make sure to have identical users/numeric ids and restore as 
root, if you want to keep those.

alternatively you can hackishly "reuse" the old full by copying it and updating 
the filenames with a proper newer timestamp. depending on your data's turnover 
you might be doing that for a while until your first incremental grows too big.

..ede/duply.net