Comments on: How-To: Automated Backups to Amazon’s S3 with Duplicity

By: gwern

gwern — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:28:55 +0000

I don't think there's any real need to have a full shell script. This is a one-liner: you can concatenate multiple shell variable definitions, and they will scope only over the one line.

Here's an example of what I mean:

[07:27 PM] 332Mb$ BAR="bar" [07:27 PM] 332Mb$ FOO="foo" ls .... [07:27 PM] 332Mb$ echo $BAR bar [07:27 PM] 332Mb$ echo $FOO

[07:27 PM] 332Mb$

The $FOO is gone, but $BAR remains. (And nothing stops one from going 'FOO="foo" BAR="bar"... ls')

By: Lee

Lee — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:02:04 +0000

If you’re having trouble with entropy gathering, running ls -lR / in the background (another login, another terminal window, or whatever) will help.

By: Callum

Callum — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:11:27 +0000

As per my earlier comment, you can do away with the need for a passphrase altogether. I'd suggest easier and more secure than storing the passphrase anywhere.

By: randy

randy — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:32:50 +0000

Woodside, I realize that now and I agree that backups of a small time blog like this don't really need to be ultra strict. This was simply my method (at the time) to automated backups. On a VPS with no other users, storing your passphrase in a human readable text file is less of an issue (as long as your root password is relatively difficult crack) than someone in a multi-user environment. If security was my ultimate goal, I probably wouldn't trust my data with a third-party service and use tape backups and store them in an offsite location.

By: S Woodside

S Woodside — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:22:45 +0000

Putting your GPG password into a C executable isn’t really going to help since it will be stored in there as text … basically I would say unless you are storing state secrets don’t worry about it, and if you are, enter your password by hand every time you back up.

By: thinking sysadmin / Duplicity to Amazon S3 on FreeBSD: Building on the work of others

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:48:00 +0000

[...] post adds only a couple small details to work described at randys.org and cenolan.com – go there for background on this post and useful scripts for automated Duplicity [...]

By: Nabeel

Nabeel — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:58:23 +0000

Nevermind, got the answer to that! Thanks very much!

By: Nabeel

Nabeel — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:55:54 +0000

Thanks for the reply! How many days does this keep a backup? Or is it continuous?

By: randy

randy — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:00:54 +0000

@Nabeel

Have a look here. It's pretty much like reversing ${SOURCE} and ${DEST} and adding a date in which you want to back up.

By: Nabeel

Nabeel — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:54:29 +0000

Great guide, but quick question – I am rather new to this. How would I then recovery my data in case of the a crash? That’s what I’m rather lost about (now including a key, etc)