Multi cloud-storage backup experiment

Using duplicity's multi backend setup to join, for example, N Mega accounts and get a great amount of storage space.

To do this you need:

• The latest version of Duplicity backup sofware;
• The mega.py Python library for the Mega.co.nz API;
• The answer from David Foerster here;
• N Mega accounts;

Duplicity Setup

You need to setup duplicity for a multi backend configuration. Create a /home/you/config.json file with this content

[
  {
    "url": "mega://USERNAME1:PASSWORD1@mega.co.nz"
  },
  {
    "url": "mega://USERNAME2:PASSWORD2@mega.co.nz"
  },
  {
    "url": "mega://USERNAME3:PASSWORD3@mega.co.nz"
  },
  ...
]

mega.py Fix

As you can see from the project repo, it has been declared deprecated. :( ...But it still works with this little trick!

• Edit (as root) this file: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mega/mega.py

• Add to the class class Mega(object) this code:

def get_name_from_file(self, file):
  for key, value in file.items():
    if 'a' in value and 'n' in value['a']:
      return value['a']['n']
  raise RequestError("Could not find the file attribute.")

Backup and Restore commands

You can now backup a /path/to/your/folder with this command:

duplicity /path/to/your/folder multi:///home/you/config.json

and restore it to /path/to/restore with:

duplicity multi:///home/you/config.json /path/to/restore

Duplicity will perform the backup using a round robin algorithm to save its backup files in the different cloud storage accounts. Assuming, for example, that your accounts are all free ones, you'll get a total available backup space of Nx50 Gb.

I don't think this can be a truly reliable solution for backups, but I can say that it has been a nice after-dinner experiment! :D