Secure Over The Internet Backups with Duplicity

Background

Duplicity is an application which uses other applications/tools to create and synchronize backups. To be clear, Duplicity can perform backups local (on the same computer) or remote (local network or any location you have network access to).

A simple explanation of duplicity is to think of it as rsync with encryption (GPG). The encryption is applied locally, prior to going over the wire, so it is TNO (Trust-No-One). Duplicity itself is a command line tool; however, there are GUI tools out there if you need.

Details

The following example uses encryption and saves the backup to a local file, if you prefer to ssh the file somewhere simply use the scp protocol/path/info (e.g. scp://uid@other.host/some_dir) rather than file:///mnt/backup/duplicity_backup.

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export PASSPHRASE=ThisIsMyPassphraseForSecuringTheBackup
duplicity --include /bin --include /boot --include /etc --include /home --include /lib \
   --include /media --include /mnt/media --include /mnt/share --include /opt \
   --include /root --include /sbin --include /selinux --include /srv \
   --include /sys --include /tmp --include /usr --include /var \
   --exclude '**' / file:///mnt/backup/duplicity_backup
unset PASSPHRASE