Duplicity vs Rsync / Boxbackup / Duplicati / Amanda for Linux backup

Hello guys!

First of all, I want to say that Duplicity is excellent backup software for Linux!

I tried Boxbackup / Duplicati / Amanda / Rsync and can compare them.

Lets look what Duplicity has:

  1. Backups are compressed and encrypted and you can encrypt them with just a pass-phrase. No need in hard-to-hide, easy-to-lose keys. Just choose reliable password, remember it and you are good.
  2. Backups can be stored on remote server with only simple access – FTP, etc. No need to install remote server software. You can easily store backups in a cloud, Dropbox, gDrive, Amazon s3, your friend’s server. You can copy backup files on any HDD, for example your external HDD. Even if your files stolen, you get no harm.
  3. Fast Incremental backups. Not just stupid differential backups, there is huge difference. If you have large files, like Virtual Machine Images or large MySQL databases, incremental backups will save a lot of disk space, network traffic and time. This is because only internal changes of a file are saved in incremental backup. Differential backup saves whole file even if one byte changes.
  4. Duplicity does not require heavy dependencies like Mono (Duplicati), only Python which is by default on almost any Linux.

For my Linux servers, desktops and notebooks I choose Duplicity over other software because it has all these features.

For my tasks Duplicity has only one drawback: it lacks hard links support. This makes Full Linux Server backups a problematic. But, I love this software so much, so I decided to add hard links support into Duplicity.

 

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