58 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Taking Backups with Duplicity
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date: 2015-05-16
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---
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I wanted to start taking backups for some time, but I haven't had the time to do any research and set everything up. After reading another [horror story that was saved by backups](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/35ljcq/couple_of_days_ago_i_did_rm_rf_in_my_home/), I decided to start taking some backups.
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<!--more-->
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After doing some research on backup options, I decided on [duplicity](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/). The backups are compressed, encrypted and incremental, both saving space and ensuring security. It supports both local and ssh files(as well as many other protocols), so it has everything I need.
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I first took a backup into my external hard drive, then VPS. The main problem I encountered was that duplicity uses [paramiko](https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko) for ssh, but it wasn't able to negotiate a key exchange algorithm with my VPS. Luckily, duplicity also supports [pexpect](http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/pexpect.html), which uses OpenSSH. If you encounter the same problem, you just need to tell duplicity to use pexpect backend by prepending your url with `pexpect+`, like `pexpect+ssh://example.com`.
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Duplicity doesn't seem to have any sort of configuration files of itself, so I ended up writing a small bash script to serve as a sort of configuration, and also keep me from running duplicity with wrong args. I kept forgetting to add an extra slash to `file://`, causing duplicity to backup my home directory into my home directory! :D
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If anyone is interested, here's the script:
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```bash
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#!/bin/bash
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if [[ $(id -u) != "0" ]]; then
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read -p "Backup should be run as root! Continue? [y/N]" yn
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case $yn in
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[Yy]*) break;;
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*) exit;;
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esac
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fi
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if [[ $1 = file://* ]]; then
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echo "Doing local backup."
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ARGS="--no-encryption"
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if [[ $1 = file:///* ]]; then
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URL=$1
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else
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echo "Use absolute paths for backup."
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exit 1
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fi
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elif [[ $1 = scp* ]]; then
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echo "Doing SSH backup."
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ARGS="--ssh-askpass"
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URL="pexpect+$1"
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else
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echo "Unknown URL, use scp:// or file://"
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exit 1
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fi
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if [[ -n "$1" ]]; then
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duplicity $ARGS --exclude-filelist /home/kaan/.config/duplicity-files /home/kaan "$URL/backup"
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else
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echo "Please specify a location to backup into."
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exit 1
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fi
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```
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