Category: backups

Exploring Duplicati

skp backups, Duplicati 1 Comment

I need a backup solution, and I wanted to explore how Duplicati worked. I’ve been using Attic, but the code seems to be old and not getting updated. Before I go installing it on my actual server, I wanted to run through it once in a virtual environment.

Spoiler alert: Duplicati didn’t do what I wanted. I’m glad I ran through it in a test environment before committing to it. It seems like it is designed for personal or single computer setups. It doesn’t have a good way to copy files over the network to the server. It might be able to copy them to a remote drive, but not pull them from a remote computer/laptop.

So, here’s a walk through of what I tried.

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Attic Tips

skp attic, backups, ssh Leave a comment

I’ve been saving space with my backups by putting them into an attic repository. I have a backup roughly every 6 months, but much of it is the same info. By using attic, I can simply store each one into a single repository without using a huge amount of space.

My latest issue was my backup session was interrupted in the middle. I had to figure out how to resume.

Spacing

Just to give you an idea of amounts of storage …

  • Current Home Directory: 378G (not backed up yet)
  • April Backup: 320G (backed up)
  • Attic Repository Size: 507G
  • Attic includes 4 backups

Adding a backup

So, here’s the command that I used to add my backup directory to the repo.

attic create --verbose \
     /backup-drive/backup-repo/repo.attic::2016-04-23-Pistachio \
     /home/skp/mnt/2016-04-23-Pistachio\ Backup

Resuming a Backup

I’m having to run my commands over SSH since my server’s kind of hard to get to without a screen. I had to take my laptop with me before the backup completed, and I had to stop the backup.

It creates a checkpoint every 5 minutes as I understand. I could see the checkpoint by running a list command:

attic list /backup-drive/backup-repo/repo.attic

Here’s the output (after I restarted it and it finished):

2012-11-10-pecan                     Sat Apr 23 00:21:13 2016
2014-10-19-pistachio.checkpoint      Sat Apr 23 21:06:24 2016
2014-10-19-pistachio                 Sun Apr 24 04:51:12 2016
2013-05-25-pecan.checkpoint          Sat Oct 29 08:42:25 2016
2013-05-25-pecan                     Tue Nov  1 10:54:33 2016
2016-04-23-Pistachio.checkpoint      Sun May 28 09:02:29 2017
2016-04-23-Pistachio                 Mon May 29 02:37:59 2017

I was looking for some special command to make it restart. I actually just used the same command that I had initially used.

attic create --verbose \
     /backup-drive/backup-repo/repo.attic::2016-04-23-Pistachio \
     /home/skp/mnt/2016-04-23-Pistachio\ Backup

Disconnectable Sessions

Next time, I thought I would look for a better solution. I like RDP in that I can disconnect and my session keeps running. I found this command would let me do the same thing with SSH sessions:

screen

To reconnect, I can just run:

screen -r

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