Déjà Dup

Do the periodic full backups upload a completely fresh copy, or roll up incremental backups?

Asked by Chris

Hi,

I am considering switching my backups to DejaDup/Amazon S3.

As I understand it, DejaDup / duplicity will perform a full backup of my data every month or so. Can you tell me if this actually copies a fresh, complete copy of the data up to S3, or are previous incremental backups intelligently rolled into the new full backup (with differences merged from the source)?

For large (several GBs) backup sets, uploading a completely fresh copy isn't feasible, due to the amount of time (and bandwidth) required.

I would also be interested to know if Deja-Dup can be set to delete historic full backups (e.g. after a year) on S3, rather than just infinitely growing in size.

Thanks,
Chris

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Michael Terry
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Best Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#1

Duplicity takes the assumption that it cannot run code on the backend. So it does not roll up previous incremental backups. It will instead upload a complete fresh copy of the data up to S3. So you'll end up with:

FullA
IncA1
IncA2
FullB

Sounds like that isn't feasible for you, though. Sorry. :-/

To answer your other question, yes Deja Dup can delete historic full backups. There is a setting in the interface for it, where you can say "keep backups at least a year".

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Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#2

Oh, and just one comment. It's not necessarily every month that you will have new full backups. The soonest it will make a fresh backup is a month. The default is three months. It depends on how frequently you have it to automatically backup.

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Chris (chris-chrisblunt-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

Hi Michael,

Thanks for clarifying.

Chris

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Chris (chris-chrisblunt-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#4

Thanks Michael Terry, that solved my question.