[Duplicity-talk] Multiple instances of duplicity

[Jan]

Hello,

I'm administrating a multiuser system and we are using Duplicity for our 
backups. After upgrading to Debian Jessie, the installed Duplicity 
version is now 0.6.24-1.
In this version the archive directory has a lock file to prevent 
multiple instances of Duplicity running at the same time.

We have several hundred gigabytes of data on our server and full backups 
tend to take a few hours to complete. If a user wants to restore one of 
his files he gets the error message, that a Duplicity instance is 
already running:


Another instance is already running with this archive directory
If you are sure that this is the  only instance running you may delete
the following lockfile and run the command again :
        
/path/to/duplicity/archive/47fe7cfbf4a66a883c49f2035d43d00c/lockfile.lock


While we appreciate that there is a lock file to prevent corruption, we 
would like to give our users the possibility to restore files or just 
display which backups are available. That seems to be possible with the 
'--name' option, which tells Duplicity to use a different subfolder in 
the archive-dir. We would set '--name' to the user name or something 
user specific whenever he wants to read from the backup (i.e. 
collection-status, list-current-files, restore). Creating a new backup 
can't be triggered by our users, so I don't think this would corrupt our 
backups.

My question is, is the '--name' option save to use in this scenario or 
is there a better way that I'm missing?


Thanks,
Jan