can duplicati backup other LAN hosts via rsync, sftp, or ssh? i am an experienced BackupPC admin looking for a suitable offsite solution. BackupPC doesn’t handle offsite storage. duplicati looks strong there. however a strength of BackupPC is requiring nothing beyond tar or rsync on the various hosts to be backed up. i’d like to setup duplicati in a similar manner somehow. any suggestions? nfs, sshfs, and samba come to mind, but have significant drawbacks.
Duplicati is designed to back up local data, so ideally it should be installed on any system that has data you wish to protect.
That being said, some have had positive results backing up remote data with some caveats:
- On Windows systems, you can manually specify UNC paths on the Source Data page. There is no mechanism to provide credentials for these paths, so the user/pw under which Duplicati runs must also be valid on the remote machine.
- On non-Windows systems, you may be able to mount a remote volume locally.
Good luck
Would you consider a two-level scheme where offsite is a for-disaster-recovery-only copy of a backup? BackupPC looks like it produces local files (posssibly with hardlinks which Duplicati could deduplicate).
I’m guessing that BackupPC could pull over a remotely-built tar file of updates based on dates, but how would it do rsync without a reference copy locally as disk files, or does it keep a reference copy locally?
backuppc speaks the rsync protocol, thus only rsync (or tar or smb) is needed on the hosts to be backed up, only new or changed files are transferred, backuppc updates it’s (optionally compressed) pool directly, and deduplicates all files across all hosts in the pool. it’s really rather ingenious. tho it takes a rather long time here, perhaps largely due to using an external usb drive for it’s storage.
i may do the 2tier scheme as a next step, tho a solution that only involved one backup tool would be desirable, as backing up the backuppc pool with duplicati would mean both tools are required in order to restore from offsite.