feature request: minor history revision
I was looking for a tool or built-in feature with duplicity whereby I can once a month replace the last month of "daily" increments with a "monthly" increment. Or perhaps, to be able to pinpoint which of the prior increments to use (some way back into the "daily" increments history) when making a new increment.
Currently I've set it up with scripting so that the run at the 1st of the month is preceded by stashing away the last month of daily increments, and then the new increment automagically becomes a monthly. In detail, my setup has an scp backend with my custom (bash) script installed at the remote end, and the stash is a subdirectory .stash/ of the store. The client end runs via a script that triggers an initial clearing and new stashing every 1st of the month.
Obviously anything with transient presence among the daily increments is "lost" from the main history timeline. However the daily strand (from a prior monthly) may be reconstructed from the stashed increments. I haven't come to needing this, but I can imagine that it will be somewhat fiddly to restore a mid-month snapshot.
In my case I discard the old stash before stashing anew as I'm not too interested in preserving the daily granularity other than for the last month (just in case). A full backup runs at ~32h whereas an increment is within 1h, and as I seriously don't expect needing to restore, ever, the history reshaping to have 12 increments for a year (rather than 365) is a good option for me.
It would be "nice" if this stashing could be covered by a duplicity command option for making an increment. I'm not sure whether or how the restore command could/would deal with it.