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Encrypted backup with Duplicity
Packed and Sent
Duplicity [1] packages one or more directories into a tar archive, encrypts the results with GnuPG, and automatically uploads the backup created in this way to a backup server. Signatures help reveal tampering or disk failure, which means backups can be stored on insecure servers or in the cloud. Duplicity even offers native functions for talking to some well-known cloud services.
Additionally, Duplicity can create incremental backups, in which the transferred archive contains only the delta to the previously created backup. This not only saves disk space on the server but also means individual backups are created faster. Duplicity is licensed under the GNU GPL and thus can be used free of charge.
Duplicity is tailored for Linux and other Unix operating systems, such as BSD or OS X. Most major Linux distributions have it in their repositories. Users of OS X can install it via Fink, for example. For Ubuntu-based distributions, there is also a PPA [2] with the current Duplicity version. Alternatively, Duplicity can be built quickly from the source code (see the box "Self-Build"). Duplicity works on Windows in the Cygwin environment but is unable to handle the specific features of the Windows filesystem. Administrators should back up Windows systems with some other software if possible.
Self-Build
If you to build Duplicity 0.7 yourself, you need the following programs and libraries:
- Python 2 version 2.6, along with the developer packages (for Ubuntu in the python-dev package)
- librsync version 0.9.6 along with developer files (for Ubuntu in the packages librsync1 and librsync-dev )
- GnuPG version 1.x
- lftp as of version 3.7.15
- A development environment with
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