Hi everyone! I had a thought for an article series, so I wrote up a
pitch (it's in the Pitches category in WP too). Here's the text, in
case the preview links don't work.
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<strong>Summary</strong>: A 3-part series on backing up with duplicity,
duply, and deja-dup
<strong>Description</strong>: I recently lost a large amount of data to
a RAID enclosure mistakenly configured as RAID0, and not backed up.
That got me thinking about an article series about backing up.
<strong>Article 1: duplicity</strong> - duplicity is the basic tool
that the following two are built on, so I want to start at the basics.
duplicity is built with rsync, and has connectors to back up to local
disks as well as S3 buckets. I'll target an S3 bucket as my backup demo
work, since off-site and redundancy are two tenants of good backups. So
starting with duplicity, we'll walk through how to successfully back up
~/Documents (and something big like ~/Photos) with <em>just</em>
duplicity.
<strong>Article 2: duply</strong> - duply builds on duplicity, mainly
by creating backup profiles that save all the commandline settings
necessary to invoke duplicity. This article would re-factor the work
done in Article 1 to use duply profiles instead. This article would
also use duply to back up a server, since the profiles can easily be
run from within cron jobs.
<strong>Article 3: deja-dup</strong> - deja-dup is a GNOME utility
that, like duply, stores profiles around duplicity. It makes creating
backup profiles super easy, and runs them on a regular frequency. This
article would refactor the work done in Article 1, using some guides
from Article 2, to backup ~/Documents and ~/Photos with deja-dup. If
possible, I would like to show how deja-dup will pick up the backups
created from within Article 1 using just duplicity; I'll need to mostly
write both articles to make sure that's the case.