Re: [Duplicity-talk] Frequency of full versus incremental backups?

[Sir Oregano]

On 7/10/07, Thomas Tuttle <address@hidden> wrote:

[snip]

> So, a few questions:
>
> 1. Any advice?  I don't have any sort of statistics on how often I
> change files, so what kind of behavior can I expect from duplicity?  Is
> it better to just pile up incrementals and keep only two full backups
> (perhaps the last two months), or is it better to do full backups more
> often?
>
> 2. Is there a way to do "backup levels", so I can have monthly full
> backups, then weekly backups of the changes since the last weekly, and
> daily backups of the changes since the last daily?  That way I could
> trash the higher-resolution backups without having to restart the whole
> chain.

Can't help you on (3), but my [attempt at] usage of duplicity seems to
answer (1) and maybe (2). I have a small home server, in which lives a
3-disk RAID-5 array. We keep everything here that needs some
'insurance' against a single-disk failure. But there's also some data
(business stuff, tax stuff, etc.) that lives on this array that needs
to survive the house burning down, too.

For this, I use duplicity with an rsync.net account, much like you. I
have 2 cron jobs, one that runs nightly (3:30AM) on month days 2-31,
and one that runs at 3:30AM on the 1st day of the month.

The monthly job performs a full backup with --remove-older-than 2W
option, and the nightly job performs the incremental.

Based on other posts in this thread, though, I think I may switch to
weekly full backups. Either way, I'll use 2 separate cron jobs to
execute differing duplicity commands.

Hope this helps,
Dave