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On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 4:27 AM Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk> wrote: |
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> |
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> Thanks Laurence. I've looked at borg before, wondering whether I needed a |
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> more sophisticated tool than just tar, but it looked like too much work for |
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> little gain. I didn't know about duplicity, but I'm used to my weekly routine |
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> and it seems reliable, so I'll stick with it pro tem. I've been keeping a |
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> daily KMail archive since the bad old days, and five weekly backups of the |
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> whole system, together with 12 monthly backups and, recently an annual |
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> backup. That last may be overkill, I dare say. |
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I think Restic might be gaining some ground on duplicity. I use |
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duplicity and it is fine, so I haven't had much need to look at |
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anything else. Big advantages of duplicity over tar are: |
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1. It will do all the compression/encryption/etc stuff for you - all |
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controlled via options. |
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2. It uses librsync, which means if one byte in the middle of a 10GB |
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file changes, you end up with a few bytes in your archive and not 10GB |
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(pre-compression). |
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3. It has a ton of cloud/remote backends, so it is real easy to store |
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the data on AWS/Google/whatever. When operating this way it can keep |
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local copies of the metadata, and if for some reason those are lost it |
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can just pull that only down from the cloud to resync without a huge |
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bill. |
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4. It can do all the backup rotation logic (fulls, incrementals, |
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retention, etc). |
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5. It can prefix files so that on something like AWS you can have the |
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big data archive files go to glacier (cheap to store, expensive to |
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restore), and the small metadata stays in a data class that is cheap |
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to access. |
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6. By default local metadata is kept unencrypted, and anything on the |
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cloud is encrypted. This means that you can just keep a public key in |
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your keyring for completely unattended backups, without fear of access |
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to the private key. Obviously if you need to restore your metadata |
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from the cloud you'll need the private key for that. |
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If you like the more tar-like process another tool you might want to |
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look at is dar. It basically is a near-drop-in replacement for tar |
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but it stores indexes at the end of every file, which means that you |
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can view archive contents/etc or restore individual files without |
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scanning the whole archive. tar was really designed for tape where |
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random access is not possible. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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