duplicity-team team mailing list archive

[Rob Oakes <lyx-devel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Group,

Reading through the most recent posts, this sounds like an absolutely 
wonderful addition to Duplicity.  Though I know it is far from ideal, I 
fall into that group of people that accumulates very long backup chains 
and incremental backups.  Part of the reason is the size of the folders 
I am mirroring, which may be between 15 to 20 gigabytes in size.  
Sending these over FTP to my offsite server can require two to three 
days of internet time (if not longer).  But since my backup scripts run 
daily, I have accumulated tremendously long and complicated backup 
chains.  I have noticed that the longer these chains get, the more time 
that duplicity requires to restore files.  (Thankfully, this is 
something that I don't have to do often.)  Being able to combine (or 
coalesce, which I agree, sounds more elegant) these disparate chains 
into a single snapshot which reflects the most recent state would be great.

I had only one additional thought, it would be very nice if this 
particular option offered a degree of fine control.  For example, while 
I often wished that I could simplify the number of snapshots in a 
particular backup set, but without combining all snapshots.  Let's say 
that only wanted to combine the incremental backups from a particular 
date range (for example, from July to August of 2008).  It would be 
wonderful to feed duplicity a command like:

duplicity coalesce --incremental 2008-07-01 2008-08-31 
"ftp://path/to/archive";

This would keep the more recent history available while simplifying the 
structure of the backup archive.

Regardless, the ability to coalesce snapshots (in addition to creating 
backups which are differential, rather than incremental in nature) would 
be a fantastic addition to duplicity.

Cheers,

Rob Oakes