HowTo Back-up your folders using Duplicity and the free FTP

[Admin]

Hello !

I havent written many tutorials later (boooo), but I hope this will change...
Now, since December last year we offer free 10 GB FTP back-up space for every customer which pays something (free ones are not eligible as well as plans sold through other sites than iperweb.com and prometeus.net).
Not every newer customer knows that since we only sent a newsletter once and the people which were not customers, naturally, didnt receive it.
How to order ?
Well, especially if you are a Prometeus.net customer, it will be a bit harder since you have to register on iperweb.com and order here: http://my.iperweb.com/cart/other-shared-services/ the 10 GB plan using the coupon FREE10.
Make sure to click on the link Use promotional code otherwise you will not get it free. It is in the first page after you clicked order button:

Once the order complete, you will have to wait a bit until it is approved (use only the prometeus.net email you registered with, otherwise we will not approve it unless you already have services with iperweb.com)
You will receive a mail like this:
Dear Miau Miau.

Your order has been accepted and your hosting account has been activated.

New Account Information

Hosting Package: FTP Backup 10
Domain: kappa.ro
First Payment Amount: £3.00 GBP
Total Amount: £0.00 GBP
Billing Cycle: Annually
Next Due Date: 2014-04-08

Login Details

Username: kapparo
Password: hGb5pILK987

Control Panel URL: https://195.88.5.11:10000/

FTP Server

Server Name: ftp01.prometeus.net
Server IP: 195.88.5.11

You can login to the control panel and change the password/domain (btw, domain is just required for virtualmin, not really a domain, please use ftp01.prometeus.net as hostname or whatever will be when this server is filled up) You can also use the IP.
Write down the hostname (ftp01.prometeus.net), username (kapparo), password (hGb5pILK987)
Now go to your server and install duplicity (you need to login with putty or other ssh client or use the console).
For Debian/Ubuntu do:

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apt-get install duplicity

For Centos do:

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yum install duplicity

Will also need ncftp (the ftp client duplicity uses)

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apt-get install ncftp

or

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yum install ncftp

This will install a simple but powerful application that will be able to back-up, compress, encrypt and store your folders on the ftp space we offered you above or any other ftp space you have.
Now, how to use it ?
For example, I wish to back-up my sites stored in /var/www/vhosts, I have all the data I need so I do this:

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FTP_PASSWORD=hGb5pILK987 duplicity /var/www/vhosts ftp://[email protected]

I will be prompted for the GnuPG passphrase for encryption (make sure you remember it or your backup will not be restorable !) twice.
Depending on how big the data is, it may take a while.
For all the options, please consult the manual page for duplicity here: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/duplicity.1.html
After it is done, I have a report:

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--------------[ Backup Statistics ]--------------
StartTime 1365385338.29 (Mon Apr  8 05:42:18 2013)
EndTime 1365385650.47 (Mon Apr  8 05:47:30 2013)
ElapsedTime 312.18 (5 minutes 12.18 seconds)
SourceFiles 18994
SourceFileSize 1844417983 (1.72 GB)
NewFiles 18994
NewFileSize 1844417983 (1.72 GB)
DeletedFiles 0
ChangedFiles 0
ChangedFileSize 0 (0 bytes)
ChangedDeltaSize 0 (0 bytes)
DeltaEntries 18994
RawDeltaSize 1842714047 (1.72 GB)
TotalDestinationSizeChange 784963497 (749 MB)
Errors 0
-------------------------------------------------

Next time you will back-up, you have the option to perform an incremental one, only upload to ftp the changes since last back-up.
It took roughly 5 minutes to back-up 1.72 GB of data.
Remember this does not back-up your sql data (databases), for instance, only the files. You may need to perform a backup from your sql client to a file and then add it to the directory being backed up, for example.
Alternatively, your administration tool (for example webmin) or hosting panel (virtualmin, EHCP, Kloxo) have integrated ftp back-up functions which can include the databases too and make the backup really easy, the above is meant to help you back-up any directory you may need. It can also back-up the whole VPS, please read the man page for more details and your OS manual for directories to skip.