On Tuesday, 28 September 2021 18:43:06 BST Laurence Perkins wrote: > There are also backup tools which will handle the compression step for you. > > app-backup/duplicity uses a similar tar file and index system with periodic > full and then incremental chains. Plus it keeps a condensed list of file > hashes from previous runs so it doesn't have to re-read the entire archive > to determine what changed the way rsync does. > > app-backup/borgbackup is more complex, but is very, very good at > deduplicating file data, which saves even more space. Furthermore, it can > store backups for multiple systems and deduplicate between them, so if you > have any other machines you can have backups there as well, potentially at > negligble space cost if you have a lot of redundancy.
Thanks Laurence. I've looked at borg before, wondering whether I needed a more sophisticated tool than just tar, but it looked like too much work for little gain. I didn't know about duplicity, but I'm used to my weekly routine and it seems reliable, so I'll stick with it pro tem. I've been keeping a daily KMail archive since the bad old days, and five weekly backups of the whole system, together with 12 monthly backups and, recently an annual backup. That last may be overkill, I dare say. -- Regards, Peter.
