Re: [Duplicity-talk] Concept and how to combine incremental and full backups to save space

[Kenneth Loafman]

Hi Christian,

duplicity supports trimming your backups via 3 commands:

  duplicity remove-older-than time [options] target_url
  duplicity remove-all-but-n-full count [options] target_url
  duplicity remove-all-inc-of-but-n-full count [options] target_url

however, none of them will remove the last backup.  You'll have to do that yourself, but I don't recommend it.  I think you really need to keep more than one level of backups if you want your data to be safe.  Good practice says the backup should be miles away in case of natural disaster at your end.  By removing your only backup you're putting all your data at risk if there's any problem making or storing the current backup.

Take a look at the man page and duplicity --help for more info.

Hope that's helpful.

...Ken

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 3:41 AM c.buhtz--- via Duplicity-talk <duplicity-talk@nongnu.org> wrote:

Hello together,

I am sorry for asking because I assume the answers are still out there.
But I wasn't able to find the needed information's or I wasn't able to
understand them and bring them together in my head.

In the duplicity docs it is recommended to not make the chain of
incremental backup's to long. Make it one month and then do a full
backup. OK, I understand why.
Technically I do not know how to "implement" this. Can I combine
switches/options that way that I only need one duplicity call and
duplicity decide itself if it has to do a incremental or full backup?

Currently I call duplicity with this (folders replaced by placeholders):

duplicity SOURCE_FOLDER file:///DESTINATION_FOLDER --no-encryption
--progress --verbosity INFO --volsize 500

I have very limited space on the destination. I think I am not able to
hold two full backups there. I only can have one full backup at time.

This is my current collection status where I have one (old) full and lot
of incremental.

Last full backup date: Fri Dec  3 09:44:22 2021
Collection Status
-----------------
Connecting with backend: BackendWrapper
Archive dir:
/home/user/.cache/duplicity/50d0997d52a684176de033baca98f9f0

Found 0 secondary backup chains.

Found primary backup chain with matching signature chain:
-------------------------
Chain start time: Fri Dec  3 09:44:22 2021
Chain end time: Thu Mar 17 09:23:28 2022
Number of contained backup sets: 26
Total number of contained volumes: 50
  Type of backup set:                            Time:      Num volumes:
                 Full         Fri Dec  3 09:44:22 2021                25
          Incremental         Fri Dec  3 10:25:03 2021                 1
          [snipped 20 incrementals]
          Incremental         Tue Mar  8 08:45:37 2022                 1
          Incremental         Thu Mar 10 11:25:11 2022                 1
          Incremental         Wed Mar 16 17:41:44 2022                 1
          Incremental         Thu Mar 17 09:23:28 2022                 1
-------------------------
No orphaned or incomplete backup sets found.

There is definitely not enough space to create a second full backup.
Maybe I can transform the incremental's into a second full so that there
are no incremental's anymore consuming space. When I have two fulls I
can delete the older one and go on with new incremental's (for one
month). Is this a good plan? :)

Kind
Christian

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