Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to duplicity ( http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ ) ?

rsclone operates like a limited rsync between different cloud providers (and local filesystem too), so either copy files or mirror two directories; duplicity does incremental backups.

I read in duplicity's man page that "In order to determine which files have been deleted, and to calculate diffs for changed files, duplicity needs to process information about previous sessions. It stores this information in the form of tarfiles where each entry’s data contains the signature (as produced by rdiff) of the file instead of the file’s contents."

Where are these tarfiles stored? The cloud?

BTW rclone checks size/timestamp and/or checksum to determine what to upload, the same way rsync does. So you don't have incremental "snapshots" the way duplicity does.

I was looking for THIS information. Well explained, Sir.

yes, and these tarfiles are in an entirely difficult format, have to be pruned, are the source of many mysterious bugs, and I've even had to write a "synthetic backup" script of my own to automatically turn a large list of "incremental" backups into a "full" backup every night. duplicity has been doing the thing I need but I spent weeks writing tools around it. Even though duplicity is written in Python, it invents a lot of its own Python installation idioms and also is not organized to provide a usable API, so scripting for it pretty much means you have to exec it.

"encrypted rsync to S3" is all I ever wanted in the first place so very much hoping this can replace it.

The signature files are stored with the data, but there is a local cache.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com