Duplicity is a

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

that provides

encrypted In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...

digitally signed A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

, versioned, local or remote backup of files requiring little of the remote server.Linux Journal: An Automated Reliable Backup Solution
Released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

(GPL), Duplicity is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

. Duplicity operates under a scheme where the first archive is a complete (full) backup, and subsequent (incremental) backups only add differences from the latest full or incremental backup.Duplicity Website: Features
Chains consisting of a full backup and a series of

incremental backups An incremental backup is one in which successive copies of the data contain only the portion that has changed since the preceding backup copy was made. When a full recovery is needed, the restoration process would need the last full backup plus al ...

can be recovered to the point in time that any of the incremental steps were taken. If any of the incremental backups are missing, then the incremental backups following it cannot be reconstructed. It does this using

GnuPG GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite. The software is compliant with RFC 4880, the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are interope ...

, librsync,

tar Tar is a dark brown or black viscosity, viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic matter, organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. ...

, and

rdiff rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like operatin ...

. To transmit data to the backup repository, it can use

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a ...

SCP SCP may refer to: Organizations Political parties * Soviet Communist Party, the leading political party in the former Soviet Union * Syrian Communist Party * Sudanese Communist Party * Scottish Christian Party Companies * Seattle Computer Produ ...

/ SFTP, local file access,

rsync rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like operatin ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...

,Bash Script: Incremental Encrypted Backups with Duplicity (Amazon S3)

Google Cloud Storage Google Cloud Storage is a RESTful online file storage web service for storing and accessing data on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharin ...

, Rackspace Cloud Files,A fork of dt-s3-backup to use with Rackspace Cloud Files
and others. Duplicity works best under

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems (such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

, and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

), though it can be used with Windows under

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin i ...

or the

Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. Currently duplicity supports deleted files, full Unix permissions, directories, and

symbolic link In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a file whose purpose is to point to a file or directory (called the "target") by specifying a path thereto. Symbolic links are supported by POSIX and by most Unix-like operating syste ...

s, fifos, and device files, but not

hard link In computing, a hard link is a directory entry (in a directory-based file system) that associates a name with a file. Thus, each file must have at least one hard link. Creating additional hard links for a file makes the contents of that file ac ...

s. Déjà Dup is a graphical user interface for Duplicity.

References

External links

Duplicity home page
Free backup software Backup software for Linux {{storage-software-stub

See also

References

External links