Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. TransIP Stack
   1. Your Own Stack
3. Duplicity
4. Automatic back-up

Introduction

When TransIP started offering 1 TB storage for free in 2015, everyone thought they were crazy. But now, 2 years later they are still able to offer this to everyone so they must be doing something right.

For most people 1 TB is more storage than they’ll ever need, it is therefore perfect for archiving everyone’s files and serving as a back-up as everyone should have those.

Due to their free offering there is now no excuse to not have back-ups in 2017 if you’re running Linux. People that run Windows are also able to do this but the installation procedure is different so it won’t be covered in this guide.

TransIP Stack

Registration

First of all, you need an account. Go to the TransIP website to request an invite code and go to your e-mail inbox to confirm your registration. It might take a while before you receive it.

Duplicity

The tool that will perform the back-ups is called Duplicity, it’s an awesome command-line application that supports multiple cloud-storage back-ends.

To install it, simply use your package manager.

For example on Fedora:

sudo dnf install duplicity -y

There is also a GUI made for it called deja-dup but that won’t be used in this guide.

Automatic back-up

Create the following scripts and put them in your crontab so that you don’t have to do it manually because everyone knows that manual back-ups is a bad idea. After a while you will do them lesser or even not at all, it’s very easy to forget.

Duplicity-backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
export PASSPHRASE=CHANGETHISPASSWORD
duplicity incremental /home/$USER/ webdavs://$STACK_USERNAME:$STACK_PASSWORD@$STACKURL/remote.php/webdav/backups/

This will only upload the changes if you make consecutive changes, if it’s the first time you back-up this will just upload the entire directory ofcourse. In the example the home folder of a user is being sent to the “backups” folder on the TransIP server.

if you want to check if your back-ups are still 100% complete you can use the built-in verify option.

Duplicity-check.sh

export PASSPHRASE=CHANGETHISPASSWORD
duplicity verify webdavs://$STACK_USERNAME:$STACK_PASSWORD@$STACKURL/remote.php/webdav/backups/ /home/$USER/

Make sure the scrips are executable by using the chmod command.

chmod u+x Duplicity-backup.sh

You can edit your crontab by doing:

crontab -e

And then add the script.

10      0       *       *       *       /home/$USER/duplicity-backup.sh

Now if you only want to take the back-up once a day or once a week you can change it to @daily or @weekly instead of 10 0 * * *.