Comment 5 for bug 1320832

I run duplicity on a Raspberry Pi 2 (with 1gb of memory) and experienced memory problems when running an initial full backup of ~100gb of data. The backup process crashed during the transmission phase due to network problems (I initially thought that memory problems were the cause for this crash).

However, I simply tried to restart the process. Duplicity figures out "where" to restart the transmission, followed by a phase of heavy CPU and memory consumption. During this phase I ran out of memory and the process was repeatedly killed by the OS.

I solved this problem by copying all files (including the archive dir) to another machine with 8gb of memory and reran the backup with the same destination. Duplicity was able to start from the point it last crashed and complete the full backup eventually. I observed that the process needed 1.3gb of memory in total. Afterwards the memory was freed and the process finished normally after the transmission.

All incremental backups are now executed on the Raspberry Pi 2 without any other problems in respect to memory consumption. I'm sure the full backup would have been completed as well if the transmission wouldn't have been interrupted.

So my problem occurs when recovering from a crash during transmission which is a little bit different from John's bug description. Note that my first comment was made before I fully analyzed the situation.