Hi,
I’m a new Duplicacy user. Most of my (family’s) computers will just use the GUI and backup c:\users\Username and be fine with cloud-only backup. But my main home desktop has probably 1TB of disk space, and I have a set of two rotating USB drives as well as access to an unlimited Google Drive account for cloud backup.
The requirements I’d like to fulfill are two-fold:
First, I’d like to rotate the two USB 1TB drives offsite every month or so. I think this will work fine-- every (say) first of the month, the backup software will realize the storage is missing a bunch of files, and “catch-up”. Since there is no local db, duplicacy will just see that it needs to backup a bunch of files and do so.
Second, I’d like to also backup this computer to the cloud. This seems do-able with the duplicacy -copy command which keeps things in-sync.
I see two issues though:
- Is the -copy command re-startable? Comcast imposes a months 1tb upload/download limit, and my data alone on the home desktop is probably 1tb or so. So my initial sync-to-the-cloud will need to be over a couple of months.
- If I want to keep the copies in-sync, the only way I can think of to do that is when I rotate the drives to do a duplicacy -copy from driveA to driveB (where driveB is the drive that was until just now, off-site). Otherwise, I won’t be able to use duplicacy -copy from driveX to cloud because the cloud might most recently have been synced with the “other” drive.
The other way I could think about it (and the way I do it in CrashPlan) is to just have three destinations: driveA, driveB, and cloud. CrashPlan fails when one of the destinations is missing, and there’s always either driveA or driveB missing, so that works. As I write this, I’m sort of leaning towards this option. It has the disadvantage though, that if I ever want to do a complete restore, my three storages aren’t in-sync, which limits options a bit (i.e., if there’s a fire and my local drive is destroyed, my remote drive would still have “most” of the files, and I could reverse copy from cloud to drive and then restore from drive).
Another thought is that I’m just being paranoid rotating offsite backup drives, and that I shouldn’t bother and just use cloud as the backup to the local USB drive.
Anyway, I’m interested in people’s thoughts and/or how others have handled.