Data Backup with Duplicity
I finally found a backup utility which meets my needs: Duplicity. It’s primarily intended for backing up data on a remote server, which is how I use it. Duplicity compresses and encrypts (using GnuPG) your data and uploads it using SSH/SCP (among other backend protocols), so it can backup data to any server you can SSH into — the target server doesn’t need to have Duplicity installed or satisfy any weird requirements.
Backing up to a remote server is nice since I don’t have to fumble about with DVDs or tapes or anything of the sort. Furthermore, it’s good to have off-site backups. On the down side, I’m now trying to push 45GB of data up to this server (the same one hosting this site) at 36.6 KB/s; this could take a while. My music collection, ripped from CDs to FLAC, comprises 32GB of that. Slow as this is, I’ll be glad to have an off-site copy of it; if my house were burnt or burgled, losing all my music would be one of the worst losses.
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