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.