Duplicity is a program which manages backup and restore of files on your Linux machine.

What is duplicity?

Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.

Backing up files

You run the backup application, and can specify the directories to backup. You can specify which directories to ignore.

The backups can be stored

• Google drive
• Networks server
• Locally attached drive
• Local Folder

That’s the easy bit.

What files are backed up?

I have my backups going to an external USB drive /media/colinpaice/UbuntuBackup1/home/Backup2024 on my Linux machine. The files have names like

duplicity-full.20240308T084825Z.vol295.difftar.gpg

The command

duplicity list-current-files file:///media/colinpaice/UbuntuBackup1/home/Backup2024 >files2024

Restore a file

duplicity restore -t 3D –file-to-restore ~/ssl/ssl2/rsaca256.csr file:///media/colinpaice/UbuntuBackup/home/Backup2021 ~/ssl/ssl2/rsa256.csr

This restores a file

• -t 3D from 3 days ago
• –file-to-restore ~/ssl/ssl2/rsaca256.csr
• file:///media/colinpaice/UbuntuBackup/home/Backup2021 from this device
• ~/ssl/ssl2/rsa256.csr to this file

What next

Duplicity can do much more than this. Ive just provided information on the most basic stuff that I have used. See the products web page or man duplicity