[SOLVED] Is there a better approach? Backup/duplicity/encrypt/copy?

[GarrettB]

I use Dropbox to upload encrypted backups of various things, including encrypted volumes, etc. as an offsite backup option in addition to onsite backups. My business is small so it works.

My scenario:

• ~20 VZDump backups, compressed, totalling around 130GB
• 200GB volume on the same SSD drive, empty at the moment
• root runs from another drive

I have installed the linux Dropbox script and it syncs fine if anything gets dropped into the 200GB volume.

On another server I have, I ran a duplicity script which compressed contents, encrypted contents, deleted old files after full backups, and logged the incremental backups along the way, etc taking from multiple folders and dropping into the Dropbox sync folder.

Questions and Thoughts:

1. It seems that duplicity will treat ALL of the VZDump files as one backup, since they are in the same folder. Is that correct? I never thought much about it because my other server's backups were databases less than 500 MB.
2. I considered somehow moving VZDump files into their own volumes so there would be multiple backups at each run (because of multiple folders/volumes), and any VZDump backup unchanged would not need updating. That seems to make everything more complicated, though. Is this a reasonable approach with work up-front but easier backup/upload loads later?
3. I read about pve-zsync and that it can be sent to a local location, but I could not find anything about encryption of the files themselves, just the transporting of the files - is there an encrypt feature for files?
4. If I go with 1 or 2, should I NOT compress the VZDump files (since duplicity will compress) or will compressing "again" be okay?
5. Is there a better way (assuming it will get uploaded to Dropbox)?
6. Can I VZDump backup AND encrypt at the same time somehow? Or, maybe with a script to simply encrypt the VZDump files and copy them to the other volume?

Thanks for joining the brainstorm!

 

[GarrettB]

Just discovered this reference to a vzdump hook! Nice...