While the 1blu vserver is still running even though I do not pay anything for it, I thought I could use it for something useful. 
I found an interesting article about encrypted and incremental backups using ftp with the app “duplicity” in issue #13 of the German computer magazine c’t. (page 216)
The author of the article, Christiane Rütten, uses a wrapper script called ftplicity to simplify the usage of duplicity. It is working really great. Here are the steps to setup an automatic, encrypted and incremental backup using ftplicity/duplicity aggregated from the article:
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apt-get install duplicity
gpg –gen-key
wget ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0613-216.tar.gz
unzip 0613-216.tar.gz
cp ftplicity/ftplicity /usr/local/bin
ftplicity
nano -w .ftplicity/conf
# GPG_KEY < = set to the 8 digit long key-id of the generated gpg key
# GPG_PW <= set to the passphrase which was used for generating the gpg key
# set the necessary ftp credentials
nano -w .ftplicity/exclude
# insert all directories which should be excluded from the back (each on a single line), for example: /dev /proc /sys /tmp /var/tmp /var/run
nano -w .ftplicity/pre
# insert all commands you want to execute before backup; for example dump of all mysql databases: mysqldump –all-databases -u admin -p’
chmod u+x .ftplicity/pre
chmod og-rwx .ftplicity/*#create first backup
ftplicity backup
#create crontab entries
# run the backup every night at 5am (incrementally)
00 5 * * * root /usr/local/bin/ftplicity backup
# run a full backup and delete old incrementals once a month
00 6 1 * * root /usr/local/bin/ftplicity full && /usr/local/bin/ftplicity purge –force
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hello,
I have been using these scripts for a long time, but then suddenly I got errors and never managed to get it working again. do you have any clue whats happening here:
h898552:~# ftplicity backup
Reading globbing filelist /root/.ftplicity/exclude
Warning, found incomplete backup sets, probably left from aborted session
No signatures found, switching to full backup.
Error initializing file /var/www/web1/user/web1_renate/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web1/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/user/web12_catalin/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/user/web12_daniela/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/user/web12_elena/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/user/web12_francesca/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/user/web12_mada/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Error initializing file /var/www/web12/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/duplicity”, line 373, in ?
if __name__ == “__main__”: main()
File “/usr/bin/duplicity”, line 366, in main
if not sig_chain: full_backup(col_stats)
File “/usr/bin/duplicity”, line 142, in full_backup
bytes_written = write_multivol(“full”, tarblock_iter, globals.backend)
File “/usr/bin/duplicity”, line 89, in write_multivol
backend.put(tdp, dest_filename)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/duplicity/backends.py”, line 349, in put
self.error_wrap(‘storbinary’, “STOR “+remote_filename, source_file)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/duplicity/backends.py”, line 335, in error_wrap
except ftplib.all_errors, e: raise BackendException(e)
duplicity.backends.BackendException
h898552:~#
I would be immensely grateful if you gave me any clues. I posted to a lot of forums and never found out how to fix it.
It’s the same for me and I neither found a solution.
I don’t believe this. I really posted in 2-3 forums dealing with linux server administration and I followed any advice I got => no result.
The stupid thing is, after giving up I switched to reoback which ran for a few month perfectly, then stopped working too => same result: no one could help me
hello, I was just wondering if you have another idea for a backupsystem? I have a root server and my provider provides ftp backupspace so I have no console access to the backupserver, therefore I had chosen ftplicity as it is perfect for the task.
But I really need a backup system so if you have any ideas
…
For the people that still care, I had this problem too, and found a fix.
This bug is caused because of a bug in ftplib. Sometimes, when the remote folder on the ftp server you are trying to backup to, is empty, then ftplib will crash. Just put a file or folder in the remote dir and you’ll be good to go…
Amazon s3 + duplicity, hands down.
There are lots of docs out there. Nice part is you only pay for usage to the GB, it’s http based so you can server http off of it such as static html, images, files (unrelated to backups, I know) and the data is guaranteed to replicated to 3 locations in the world.
Tim Vaillancourt