Duplicity VS Rdiff-backup

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ at least can use PGP public keys. I've used it for a long time and not seen any particular reason to change.

There are backup tools with built-in encryption like borg backup or duplicity, these should be fine. If you already have a backup process and it's missing encryption then you should be able to use e.g. age or gpg.

For my family photos (critical, irreplaceable, on plex), I use duplicity which can make use of Amazon Glacier and Deep Archive for really cheap storage (0.00099 /gb /month no joke) with incremental versioning and client side encryption. Long restore time, but perfect for disaster recovery on data that doesn't change much. Want to set up the same for music (which rarely but sometimes changes, e.g. Correcting tags).

And google docs / apple cloud etc. aren't proper backups. They can cancel your account, be inaccessible, or hacked even. There's software like duplicity that can upload encrypted backups to multiple services, which are handy. But in any case, if you're doing cloud backups, do do redundant local backups too. My setup is I've a USB stick tacked onto a Raspberry Pi computer, and use something called borg to do daily backups over SSH.

I have had good success using [Duplicity](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) via [Duply](https://www.duply.net/) for a few years now. The main point for me is that duplicity directly backs up to many cloud-storage endpoints. I'm using google drive specifically, but it supports a ton of options.

For starters it has a tendency to paint itself into a corner on ENOSPC situations. You won't even be able to perform a restore if a backup was started but unfinished because it ran out of space. There's this process of "regressing" the repo [0] which must occur before you can do practically anything after an interrupted/failed backup. What this actually must do is undo the partial forward progress, by performing what's effectively a restore of the files that got pushed into the future relative to the rest of the repository, which requires more space. Unless you have/can create free space to do these things, it can become wedged... and if it's a dedicated backup system where you've intentionally filled disks up with restore points, you can find yourself having to throw out backups just to make things functional again - even ability to restore is affected.

That's the most obvious glaring problem, beyond that it's just kind of garbage in terms of the amount of space and time it requires to perform restores. Especially restores of files having many reverse-differential increments leading back to the desired restore point. It can require 2X the file's size in spare space to assemble the desired version, while it iteratively reconstructs all the intermediate versions in arriving at the desired version. Unless someone fixed this since I last had to deal with it, which is possible.

Source: Ages ago I worked for a startup[1] that shipped a backup appliance originally implemented by contractors using rdiff-backup. Writing a replacement that didn't suck but was compatible with rdiff-backup's repos consumed several years of my life...

There are far better options in 2024.

[0] https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/src...

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/axcient

Rdiff-backup - close to what you do currently but at least provides versioning. Based on rsync

as in just a copy of your files? This I would barely consider a backup, more of just a mirror from a point in time. What're you missing by doing this? versions of files, deduplication, and encryption (last one being very important for the best kind of backups, which should be off-site). Just because it's not files doesn't mean it's proprietary. Proprietary would mean secret and undocumented. There are many great options. Borg is my favorite but Kopia is probably better if you use windows, urbackup is an option if you want centralized management of backups and rdiff-backup is if you want something kinda what you have currently but adding versioning but lacks deduplication and encryption.

Rdiff Backup - Reverse differential backups that uses rsync, linking, and can tunnel via ssh. You get a full current backup with increments available to restore any version of the file with minimal storage space used.

borg is great. we've been using it for the past 3 years to archive hundreds of file-level backups of servers, database dumps and VM images. average size of each borg repo is few GB but there are few outliers up to few hundreds of GB.

borg replaced https://rdiff-backup.net/ for us and gave:

Robocopy is great if you don't have access to rsync. If rsync via WSL2 for instance is an option, I'd personally go with rdiffbackup.

For incremental backups rdiff-backup is practical too.

You have to try them out and decide for yourself of course. I've used to using Vorta which was great at least on openSUSE. Then for cli backup solution I used rdiff-backup which was also really good