What value do I need to set the Days field on the Backup Configuration page for the system to perform full backups each day?
LB
Afaik, MiaB will only do incremental backups.
I am not certain why anyone would want to deviate from that as creating full backups extends the time that the server is down for maintanance and is generally overly repetitive.
Could you please elaborate as to what the perceived benefit is of a daily full backup vs an incremental backup?
Can you tell me what the Days field is for then since the system only takes one full backup when you turn Backup on and then only does incremental after that?
Honestly, I would never recommend not having backups turned on.
It is kind of confusing, and I do not really understand the algorithm but the number of days is the MINIMUM number of days the backup will be kept before it is deleted. But, in most cases the backups run over several days.
If you want to do a planned move, simply rerun the backup.py script then you just have the one large file.
1 Like
After a period of time, the system will start a new incremental backup … when that new incremental backup is started the old backup will be kept for at least the number of days specified.
Yes, MIAB uses Duplicity to perform backups. It will create a full backup. Then a series of incremental backups. Then after a time, another full backup. Some n days after which the previous backups will be deleted.
From the script, I think this is the section which determines when a full backup occurs:
# Force a full backup when the total size of the increments
# since the last full backup is greater than half the size
# of that full backup.
The backup files are encrypted with GnuPG so they can be copied and stored anywhere (I move mine to Dropbox for now).
Remember to copy the the secret key off to somewhere safe in case you need to use the backups.
Per the instructions on page it is stored here:
/home/user-data/backup/secret_key.txt
4 Likes