Duplicity is a

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

that provides

encrypted In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plain ...

, digitally signed, versioned, local or remote backup of files requiring little of the remote server. Released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL), Duplicity is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

. Duplicity operates under a scheme where the first archive is a complete (full) backup, and subsequent (incremental) backups only add differences from the latest full or incremental backup. Chains consisting of a full backup and a series of

incremental backups An incremental backup is one in which successive copies of the data contain only the portion that has changed since the preceding backup copy was made. When a full recovery is needed, the restoration process would need the last full backup plus al ...

can be recovered to the point in time that any of the incremental steps were taken. If any of the incremental backups are missing, then the incremental backups following it cannot be reconstructed. It does this using

GnuPG GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's cryptographic software suite PGP. The software is compliant with the now obsoleted , the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are ...

, librsync,

tar Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black b ...

. To transmit data to remote backup repositories, it can use

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

/ SCP/ SFTP,

rsync rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like opera ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerc ...

Google Cloud Storage Google Cloud Storage is an online file storage web service for storing and accessing data on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabi ...

amongst others. even more backends may be used via the

Rclone Rclone is an open source, Multithreading (software), multi threaded, Command-line interface, command line computer program to manage or migrate content on cloud storage, cloud and other high Latency (engineering)#Packet-switched networks, laten ...

backend. Duplicity works best under

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating systems (such as

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

, and

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

), though it can be used with Windows under

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operati ...

or the

Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a component of Microsoft Windows that allows the use of a GNU/Linux environment from within Windows, foregoing the overhead of a virtual machine and being an alternative to dual booting. The WSL command-lin ...

. Currently duplicity supports deleted files, full Unix permissions, directories, and

symbolic link In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a file whose purpose is to point to a file or directory (called the "target") by specifying a path thereto. Symbolic links are supported by POSIX and by most Unix-like operating syste ...

s, fifos, and device files, but not

hard link In computing, a hard link is a directory entry (in a Directory (computing), directory-based file system) that associates a name with a Computer file, file. Thus, each file must have at least one hard link. Creating additional hard links for a fil ...

s. Déjà Dup is a graphical user interface for Duplicity. Duply is a shell frontend for Duplicity adding support for profiles and batch commands.

References

External links

Duplicity home page
Free backup software Backup software for Linux Free software programmed in Python Software using the GNU General Public License {{storage-software-stub

See also

References

External links