[Duplicity-talk] Mirroring vs. Sets (was: Newbie/General Questions)

[email builder]

First, thanks a lot for the great responses!!!

>>>  3) I'm a little confused by the concept of "sets" and the 

>>> need to
>>>  remove sets of a certain age, etc.  My goal is to find a way to back
>>>  up some user data in its current state, no need to keep track of the
>>>  historical state of that data.... well, as long as it takes extra 
>>> storage,
>>>  which I assume it does, yes?
>> 
>>  There is no need to remove any sets. But after a while your chain of
>>  sets will be pretty long, which makes it slow to restore any data.
>>  Hence it is recommended to do full backups time to time, and delete
>>  old sets after. Having said that, I never do that, I always keep all
>>  my backups, and duplicity handles it just fine :)
> 
> that's standard backup methodology. backups should protect from accidential 
> deletion or hidden data corruption as well, which you might notice as late as 
> after several backups.

OK that makes sense, but I'm planning to mirror multiple user email
data from a server to probably more than one location.  I think in that
case, mirroring is the standard methodology.  It seems like historical
backups are used more for personal data.

Does that make sense or.... not?

Plus, from the example given of 14MB extra in 2 months on top of a
90MB data set, that's not insignificant, especially when handling bigger
(and rapidly changing as email does) data sets.

>>>  a) Is there a way to do what I thought traditional rsync does - just
>>>  keep a mirror of my current data and no historical information?  What
>>>  options do I need to do this?
>> 
>>  That is what rsync is for, right? Duplicity cannot mirror AFAIK, it
>>  packs your files into archive sets.
> 
> check rdiffdir which comes with duplicity. it is unfortunately not encrypted.

Well, obviously I'm naive here, but I came to find duplicity because of the
encryption.  rsync + gpg.  If rdiffdir doesn't encrypt, why not just use rsync?
Anyhow... since it sounds like the only way to use encryption is to stay
with duplicity, I ask again if there's a way to effectively implement mirroring
without historical information?  (without also having to do full backups every
time)

If I'm doing something really inadvisable, I'm open to hearing opinions too.

>>>  4) Tips on good backup locations... anyone used duplicity with
>>>  box.net or similar services?
>> 
>>  Yes, I used webdav, works great. You may also try mydrive.ch, it
>>  offers 2GB with unlimited traffic. I do regular backups on it via
>>  webdav. There were some problems with webdav in the past, seems all
>>  bugs affecting webdav are now ironed out. Keep in mind, webdav server
>>  implementations dont follow the standards exactly, hence expect
>>  hitches sometimes.
> 
> there are currently problems with box.net afaik .. all current backends can 
> be 
> considered stable, there is a new one in the pipeline for rapidshare.

Wow.  Cool.  Too bad about box.net though.

> generally you should set up your backup work flow and do regular verification 
> and some restores in the starting period to check if everything checks out.
> 
> remember, a backup is successful only after a successful restore.

Indeed

THANK YOU!!!