Duplicity: Plain Text

Hello everyone! It's time to experiment. The object is Duplicity. What is Duplicity? Find out at developer's website. In my simple opinion, Duplicity is a tool (or software, whatever you call it) that firstly store files on a folder and then store their differences at next execution. If you don't understand, I don't blame you. I didn't understand too when saw Duplicity first time.

Let's start with experiment. But you must install it first. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, this is what I did for installation.

1	sudo apt-get install duplicity

Plain Text - Test

This experiment will test Duplicity with plain text files.Here the steps.

1. Make an empty folder as source. I give it name "source_folder" as my example.
2. Fill the source_folder with three files. My example: The files are "first_file.txt", "second_file.txt", and "third_file.txt" and they contain message inside "This is first state".
3. Run duplicity as below

   1	duplicity /full/path/to/source_folder/ file://backup_folder

   This command will backup source_folder and stored in backup_folder (you may change this folder name). You would assign GnuPG passphrase soon after execute the script.
4. Restore the backup using 

   1	duplicity restore file:///full/path/to/backup_folder/ /full/path/to/restore_folder/

5. Then change files inside source_folder and execute script in step 3.
6. Restore with

   1	duplicity restore file:///full/path/to/backup_folder/ /full/path/to/restore_folder2/

Result:
First duplicity command is a full backup and second one is incremental backup. In my example, full backup is restored as restore_folder and second one is restore_folder2. This is the differences between restore_folder and restore_folder2.

Fig 1. Text file inside restore_folder

Fig 2. Text file inside restore_folder2