Duplicity makes multiple backups

[David Oxland]

Lately I've noticed that Dropbox is running/updating continously.
 Check and found hundreds of backups. Duplicity is set to back up once per week.

Deleted all but the last backups but it just keeps making more.
Drop box will be looking for more money soon.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
duplicity 0.7.06
 gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.DejaDup > /tmp/deja-dup.gsettings; gave no output

[David Oxland (doxland)]

After deleting many old backups
 saw (see snapshot)
Whole bunch of new ones just made today Jul 20.
 I had the feeling that it was making backups of backups
Also whole machine seems to be running slowly at times. Out put typing this lags a few seconds behind key input.
Remarkably, while typing up this bug CPU load on all four CPUs has dropped to minimum even with synching resumed. and synching indicator has has stopped?
This problem has been going on for several days.
Was thinking of removing and reinstalling Duplicity.

[Vej (vej)]

Hello David,

Deja Dup will make a full backup from time to time, which means that everything backed up before needs to be backed up again. This is necessary to prevent data loss resulting from very long backup chains of incremental backups. It also is the only way to delete old backups, because all incremental backups since the last full backup need to be kept for you to be able to restore all your data.

Your screenshot shows, that your backup from the 20. of July is such a full backup, which has been split to several volumes. But it is only one single backup!

So you should check, if you accidentally included more data in your backup, than you wanted to (or can afford to). A circular backup as you suggested would indeed be a possibility here, if you included your dropbox folder in the backup.

BTW.: If the screenshot shows every file, that is left (and you deleted the rest) you will not be able to restore any of them using Deja Dup or Duplicity, because your backup sets are both not complete. Although you could decrypt and unpack them "by hand" to retrieve at least some of the files.

[Vej (vej)]

Please let me know if the above comment does solve the issue for you.

[David Oxland (doxland)]

Hello Vej
Thanks for your reply
Destination folder I had chosen was /home/david/Dropbox/Backups
 and I suspect this was the trouble;
 I propose to choose only /home/david/Dropbox
Does that follow through? am I on the right track?
Thanks

[Vej (vej)]

Hello David,

the destination folder is not so important here and /home/david/Dropbox/Backups should be fine. But this path is a path inside of your home directory, which is probably in your include list. So you need to ensure, that /home/david/Dropbox/Backups is part of your exclude list or you have a circular backup.

If you want me to investigate further, I need the following informations:

*The file* /tmp/deja-dup.gsettings after running the following line (you may want to scrub the file of any incriminating file names or details):
    gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.DejaDup > /tmp/deja-dup.gsettings

And the file /tmp/deja-dup.log after running the line below and replicating the problem (you may want to scrub the log of any incriminating file names or details):

    DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1 deja-dup --backup | tail -n 1000 > /tmp/deja-dup.log

Best

Vej

[David Oxland (doxland)]

answered solved

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]