Amazon S3 and Duplicity = Simple Backup

My family has ~62 GB of photos and videos that we store on our local fileserver in our home. However, while it’s on a Linux softraid 1 storage/filesystem, remote backup of this system has been unsolved for some time. Now I simply gave up waiting. Loosing it would simply be too painful, and I’m surrendering to the cost associated with remote backup. The solution is really simple: [Amazon S3][s3] for offsite/remote storage, Duplicity for incremental backup, [GNU Privacy Guard (gpg)][gpg] for encryption.

Ideally, I’d have a server somewhere which I could do backups to, using Box Backup. I’ll get there someday, but not today. (And my pomodoro time box is ticking.)

Steps to set it all up:

  1. Get an account at Amazon AWS, enable Simple Storage Service - S3
  2. Create a “bucket” in the S3 console, where you will store the backup
  3. Install duply
  4. duply main create
  5. Edit ~/.duply
    • GPG_PW
    • TARGET (see regions)
    • SOURCE
  6. duply main backup (in screen, since it takes quite some time on complete backup runs)
  7. cron
  8. puppetize

I used this blog post as a template.

[s3]: [gpg]: https://www.gnupg.org/

This work by Fredrik Wendt is licensed under CC by-sa.