testing and doubs

Manuel     Feb 3 4:47AM 2017 CLI

I'm testing the product, and it looks ok for me, but have several doubs. I'm currently using ubuntu 32bits cli version (I think that it is discontinued).

  • Symlinks soft and hard links. I have organized a directory were lives links for all directories that I want to backup, for example /etc/ , /home/someone/data , ... And no links are backuped.

I'm using google cloud storage Nearline, this product is cheaper than normal but read access to it is expensive than normal one. My question is: Does duplicaty lots of reads to sync from one backup to the next one? Which is the strategy used to know if a file is modified or not.

Thanks!


gchen    Feb 3 8:10AM 2017

First-level symlinks are followed (that is, those right under the repository directory). All other symlinks are backed up as they are. Hardlinks are treated as normal files, so if you link other directories as hardlinks they should be included in the backup.

Duplicacy needs the snapshot file from last backup when performing a new backup. The snapshot file includes the complete file list and the list of referenced chunks. This file is cached in .duplicacy/cache to minimize the number of reads from the storage.

By default a file is uploaded if its modification time has been changed since last backup, but if you specify the -hash option it will rescan all files.


gchen    Feb 3 8:11AM 2017

I just uploaded a linux i386 binary.


Manuel    Feb 4 7:48AM 2017

Thanks Gchen!

Just one comment, hard links are not supported in Linux.

If some one is interested in other aproach, I achieved it doing mounts in this way. I mount it in readonly mode to avoid problems like recursive deletion or similar unexpected situations.

mkdir /path/to/mountPoint cd /path/to/mountPoint mkdir archives1 mount -o bind,readonly /path/to/archives1 archives1 mount -o bind,readonly /path/to/archives2 archives2 .... (in some old systems, like mine, mounting bind type in readonly do not work, so you have to remount after mount. So if you you receive a message like "looks like no readonly mount" remount all units. in this way) mount -o bind,remount,ro /path/to/archives1 /path/to/mountPoint/archives1

That's all, do a duplicacy init and backup.


gchen    Feb 4 8:50PM 2017

Right, mount points are a good way to link other directories (especially when you can make them read-only).