When Fedora 13 hit the streets I was excited to see a new backup solution, Deja Dup, included in the distribution.  For the past several months I've been using my own version of a backup solution, namely rsync rdiff-backup, which always felt a little cobbled together.  But now I have a shiny new backup solution that will solve all of my problems, right?

Well, unfortunately I wish I could give Deja Dup better reviews. Because Deja Dup is a shiny frontend for Duplicity I can't really tell you which one I don't like.  The biggest problem is that from day to day the system may backup appropriately or it may error out for no apparent reason.  When it does error out the information I receive to help troubleshoot the problem is less than helpful.  Most of the time it simply says that the program error is unknown.

It also takes quite a while to make regular, daily incremental backups. With so little changing on the system daily there shouldn't be much to backup but it still takes half an hour or longer to do so whereas my rsync would take 10 minutes on a bad day.

Deja Dup, and Duplicity by extension, have a really cool feature that rsync does not have, however.  Deja Dup provides the ability to use synchronous encryption on your backup.  If you use Duplicity you can use asynchronous encryption as well.  This is a great feature if you are doing off-site backups to a location that you don't fully trust. Unfortunately I never got that feature to work, either.

So I'm moving back to my trusty and faithful rsync rdiff-backup which also means a full backup today.  Hopefully Deja Dup will soon become that solution I've been dreaming about for so long.