[HN Gopher] Duplicati: Free backup software to store encrypted b...
___________________________________________________________________
Duplicati: Free backup software to store encrypted backups online
Author : memorable
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-11-03 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.duplicati.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.duplicati.com)
| rroot wrote:
| I highly recommend Borg Backup. I had to give up on Duplicati
| years ago, perhaps they're OK now. But Borg is magic.
|
| https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
| sendfoods wrote:
| I use borg with a Hetzner storage box [0]. Works very well for
| me.
|
| [0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us
| Tepix wrote:
| This looks interesting, thanks for all those warnings, i will
| stay away from it for now.
|
| However the next question would always be which cloud provider to
| use.
|
| Is OVH cloud archive the cheapest cloud storage for backups in
| europe? It lets me use scp or rsync, among others.
|
| They are charging(SS) $0.011/GB for traffic and $0.0024/month/GB
| for storage.
|
| So if my total backup is size 100gb and i upload 5gb per day of
| incremental backups i pay around $2 per month.
|
| --
|
| SS https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#473
| pmontra wrote:
| Or a small computer with a disk at a friend's home and backup
| to that. It's cheaper than cloud after one or two years, always
| less reliable, network speed is probably OK, you can have
| physical access. If the friend is a techy it could be one among
| many other little computers in that home. You can reciprocate
| by hosting his/her backup at your home.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah this is what I do.. One at a friend's house in his rack,
| the other one elsewhere with an external drive on a raspberry
| zero 2 :P
|
| The good thing is you can add more storage. The bad thing is
| no enterprise class guarantees of course. But having multiple
| mitigates that.
| asmor wrote:
| It's pretty hard to beat Hetzner Storage Boxes, if you can live
| with the fixed provisioning (beyond being able to switch
| between the tiers).
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
| aborsy wrote:
| Does Hetzner have a service that nigh work for ZFS receive
| (beyond dedicated server)?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > It's pretty hard to beat Hetzner Storage Boxes
|
| They had a recent change in pricing ... did you take that
| into account?
| jacooper wrote:
| The data resiliency is pretty weak. Its only a single Raid
| cluster away from losing data.
| asmor wrote:
| This is true, but I already try not to rely too much on one
| backup target, so it works out for me as yet another
| replica.
| jacooper wrote:
| Far from it really.
|
| Backblaze is much cheaper, and can have free egress when using
| Cloudflare with it.
|
| There is also Storj, a decentralized storage coin and it gives
| 150 GB for free + $4/TB with free egress matching what you
| stored.
|
| another one is IDrive E2, it $4/tb, with the first year costing
| the same as a single month, with egress for free up to about
| three times the size of what's stored.
|
| Hetzners storage boxes are pretty cheap, but that is for a
| reason.
|
| The upload speed is pretty slow outside Hetzners network (from
| my experience) and more importantly is that data is only
| protected by a single RAID cluster.
|
| They also offer free Unlimited egress.
|
| But I would personally go with Backblaze or maybe IDrive.
| thesimon wrote:
| Cheap and dirty: Office 365 family plan with 6 account a 1TB
| each for around $60/year.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| Seems to be 100$ a year now.
| [deleted]
| rsync wrote:
| "Is OVH cloud archive the cheapest cloud storage for backups in
| europe? It lets me use scp or rsync, among others."
|
| OVH may, indeed, be the cheapest.
|
| If you email[1] and ask for the long-standing "HN Reader
| Discount" you can get $0.01/GB storage and free
| usage/bandwidth/transfer.
|
| Zurich Equinix ZH4 on init7 pipes.
|
| Depending on your preference either [2] or [3] may be the most
| compelling aspect of our service.
|
| [1] info@rsync.net
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26960204
|
| [3] https://www.rsync.net/products/universal.html
| marceldegraaf wrote:
| Does this discount also apply to the raw ZFS plans at
| rsync.net? Looking for a reliable and cost efficient place to
| push my ZFS snapshots via "zfs send".
| rsync wrote:
| Yes, although larger (4TB) account size minimum still
| applies.
|
| Email us ...
| willriches wrote:
| If you plan to use Duplicati please pay attention to the docs
| around block size. We used this to back up a couple 100GB of data
| to S3. Recovery was going to take over 3 days to reassemble the
| blocks based on the default 100KB block size. For most
| applications you will want at least 1MB if not more.
|
| Otherwise a good product and has been reliable enough for us.
|
| * https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/appendix-c-choosi...
| jacooper wrote:
| Thanks for the note!
| kavalg wrote:
| - LGPL license
|
| - Cross platform (.NET / Mono)
|
| - Incremental backups with compression
|
| - Encryption (AES-256)
|
| - Backup verification
|
| - Block level deduplication
|
| - WebUI
|
| - Lots of backend supported
|
| Wondering how does that compare to https://restic.net/
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Restic is CLI focused whereas Duplicati is GUI focused. Restic
| is based around repositories, which can contain multiple
| backups from multiple sources, whereas Duplicati's backups are
| not (although the actual backup format is similarly broken up
| into lots of small blocks).
| rjzzleep wrote:
| One of these backup apps had a comparison table in their wiki.
| I can't remember which one and how accurate it still is.
| z9znz wrote:
| You may be referring to this page:
| https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
|
| If you scroll down, below the benchmarks, it lists features
| and comparisons with other options.
| rovr138 wrote:
| https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy#comparison-with-
| oth...
| l33tman wrote:
| Yet Another Recommendation: borg backup to a local server daily,
| then rclone to S3 (or another cloud provider) to backup the whole
| local backup server repo weekly or something...
| PYTHONDJANGO wrote:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_...
| nimbius wrote:
| duplicati is basically a paid C# version of duplicity, an open
| source backup application
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(software)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati
|
| edit: oh boy, need another cup of coffee. im entirely wrong.
| thinking of _duplicacy_ https://duplicacy.com/ which comes with a
| slick paid frontend.
| cpach wrote:
| If it's any comfort, you're not the first one to confuse these
| programs...
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| Wait. The title uses the word free, but you write that it
| requires payment. Looking at the website I can't find a way to
| pay for it other than a donation.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| How is it paid?
|
| It's fully open-source, LGPL licensed, and from the website the
| only payment options are donations.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| A more accurate description might be that Duplicati is a free
| open source Windows version of Duplicity. It works pretty well,
| by the way.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| re: edit: _duplicacy_ is also free and open source for just the
| CLI version ( https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/releases
| ) , the 'slick paid frontend' is optional and sold by
| https://duplicacy.com/ and even then is free "to restore,
| check, copy, or prune existing backups"
| rovr138 wrote:
| > duplicacy is also free and open source for just the CLI
| version
|
| Not what I see.
|
| From the website, https://duplicacy.com/buy.html
|
| >GUI/CLI licenses are not required under the following
| situations:
|
| > - Running the CLI version to back up personal
| files/documents on a home computer
|
| > - Running the CLI version to restore, check, copy, or prune
| existing backups on any computer
|
| > - Running the CLI version to back up any files on a
| computer where a GUI license is already installed
|
| From the repo,
|
| https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE.
| ..
|
| > Copyright (c) 2017 Acrosync LLC
|
| > - Free for personal use or commercial trial
|
| > - Non-trial commercial use requires per-computer CLI
| licenses available from duplicacy.com at a cost of $50 per
| year
|
| > - The computer with a valid commercial license for the GUI
| version may run the CLI version without a CLI license
|
| > - CLI licenses are not required to restore or manage
| backups; only the backup command requires valid CLI licenses
|
| > - Modification and redistribution are permitted, but
| commercial use of derivative works is subject to the same
| requirements of this license
|
| Not really open source.
| kidsil wrote:
| use restic. It's like git but for backups.
|
| Many years ago I was a happy user of CrashPlan as the data was
| also easily accessible, but when they stopped their private user
| plans I looked into several solutions (Duplicati, duplicacy, and
| some others too). restic was the only one light enough for me to
| use consistently, which is a critical thing about backups.
| funOtter wrote:
| Does anyone have experience with comparing restic and Rclone? I
| feel like they are similar.
|
| * https://rclone.org/
| dave78 wrote:
| While there's probably some overlap for certain use cases,
| I'd say they're more complementary. In fact, Restic leverages
| rclone to support a lot of cloud storage services. Restic is
| specifically meant as a backup tool and does encryption,
| deduplication, snapshots, and now apparently compression.
| Rclone is more of a synchronization tool/copying tool (which
| could also be used to make backups), more like rsync or even
| just cp (but with cloud storage support).
| funOtter wrote:
| Thanks!
| seized wrote:
| Rclone is more for syncing than backups. Its great for moving
| files between storage systems and syncing one path to a
| destination. Some backup tools use it for uploading/etc.
| dsego wrote:
| Rclone is like rsync for the cloud, you can sync files to a
| google drive or other service. And like CCC it can archive
| deleted files as a saftey net. I love the simplicity, no
| deltas, snapshots or restore procedures, the files are just
| there on the destination.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I use restic to a backup to a local drive, then use cloud
| storage to backup the repos. I know restic supports some direct
| backup to some cloud backends directly, but this seems more
| decoupled and less prone to errors/hangs.
| ElDji wrote:
| I'm using restic on servers, Kopia on pc/mac
| alexktz wrote:
| Restic is absolutely great. Wrap it in Autorestic and it's even
| better!
|
| https://autorestic.vercel.app/
| Saris wrote:
| I've been using Autorestic but it has some issue, it keeps
| modifying the yml file on its own with an invalid config
| option, which causes the backups to fail.
|
| Not a good thing for something that's supposed to run in the
| background and keep things backed up.
| fdw wrote:
| I've had a good experience with
| [crestic](https://github.com/nils-werner/crestic), even
| though it seems a lot smaller and simpler than autorestic.
| But I really like how the same backup can be configured for
| different backends. Autorestic's seemed more complicated in
| comparison.
| jacooper wrote:
| The problem with autorestic is its development is pretty
| slow. Many PRs are still not merged, and there are very few
| commits.
| hjuutilainen wrote:
| There's also resticprofile which takes care of scheduling
| (with launchd on macOS) and maintenance tasks for restic. I
| especially enjoy that resticprofile can create a prom file
| for the backup status that I can just scoop up to my
| monitoring.
|
| https://creativeprojects.github.io/resticprofile/
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| I use Kopia + Backblaze with linux. No problems so far.
| jacooper wrote:
| Same question. I set up duplicati for a small server to
| backup WordPress websites In docker with a script, and it
| seems to work just fine.
| jacooper wrote:
| Oops wrong comment to reply to.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Just wondering: Any reason you don't use Kopia on the servers
| as well?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| One of my friends really swears by this but I find something so
| GUI driven really complex to automate for the things I do :)
|
| Most of my 'backup' is more like synchronising offline archives.
| I don't really backup full machines, just the data.
|
| So I'm back to some custom encfs + rsync scripts and pretty happy
| with that :P
| macropin wrote:
| Not to be confused with duplicity, or duplicacy backup programs
| which have similar features.
| ahnick wrote:
| Duplicacy has been incredibly stable for me over the years and
| I still prefer it's lock-free deduplication design. Looks like
| 28 days ago there was a major release as well. Time to upgrade.
| :)
|
| https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
| Normille wrote:
| Another happy long-term Duplicacy user here. My only problem
| with it is; on the rare occasions I need to restore something
| from backup, I can never remember the correct syntax and
| always have to look it up again.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Make a script!
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Or a do-nothing script if you don't want to automate it
| right away.
|
| https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-
| scripting-...
| Normille wrote:
| Never seen that concept before. I've done similar in the
| past using aliases in my _~ /.zshrc_
| alias taskname='echo "blah. blah... instructions for
| task..."'
|
| Of course, then I have to remember what nemonnic I used
| for 'taskname'!
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I had the exact same reaction. I have little "README.md"
| text files scattered about to remind me how to do things
| and never thought to make an interactive post-it note.
| jacooper wrote:
| Note, its not open source. Duplicati is.
| itintheory wrote:
| It seems to be open source (source code is in github), but
| the license isn't free for commercial use. I'm not exactly
| sure what to call it...
| ajvs wrote:
| Source available
| ValentineC wrote:
| Source-available, I guess.
| patentatt wrote:
| Agreed, duplicacy seems to be more resilient to the
| inevitable errors or hiccups along the way. The only downside
| is that it seems to be inefficient with storage with small
| metadata updates which happen frequently with my use case.
| lepapillon wrote:
| They have some major differences. Enough so that I first tried
| Duplicati and ran into corruption issues so frequently that I
| sought out an alternative and luckily found Duplicacy.
|
| Duplicacy has been stable for years now and I gladly pay the
| commercial license. It seemed like Duplicacy constructs a giant
| DB of all the files and manages everything that way, whereas
| Duplicacy's approach is much simpler and is less prone to
| corruption. The large DB approach seems to fail when the backup
| set contains a large number of files that many users manage.
| rovr138 wrote:
| > It seemed like Duplicacy
|
| Duplicati?
|
| ----
|
| These names are always a mess. I half the time quit comparing
| these tools due to not being able to keep the names straight.
| lepapillon wrote:
| That's right -- Duplicati constructs the giant house-of-
| cards DB). I sometimes need to run a $> ps -ax to remember
| which one I'm using when it comes time to change the
| config.
| kurtreed wrote:
| I used Duplicati for a few years. The backup process would fail
| silently every once in a while and wouldn't run again until I
| manually reset it. It did save me once after a storage device
| failure. Now I just put stuff I want to back up in Dropbox or
| git.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I recommend duply[1]. It is a frontend for duplicity:
|
| https://duply.net/Duply_(simple_duplicity)
| lgunsch wrote:
| I've been using Duply as a simple CLI front end to Duplicity (not
| Duplicati) for years now. It's worked great for me on many
| servers and personal machines.
| bobek wrote:
| Just use restic and reclone and be done with it.
|
| https://bobek.cz/blog/2020/restic-rclone/
| dimatura wrote:
| I've used restic with the backblaze and S3 backends - works
| pretty well for me. The newest version also has compression on
| top of deduplication, like borg, which is nice. (Of course, it
| will only make a difference for compressible data - most images
| or videos won't compress, but say, JSONs will).
| bakugo wrote:
| I occasionally use restic but one thing I don't like about it
| is the sheer number of data files it creates (45k for ~800GB in
| my case) which makes it a pain to use with certain cloud
| storage providers that don't always handle tens of thousands of
| files very well (gdrive being a good example).
|
| Is there some way to get it to not make as many files?
| dimatura wrote:
| You would want to tune the pack size, https://restic.readthed
| ocs.io/en/stable/047_tuning_backup_pa...
| flamebreath447 wrote:
| I still use Backblaze for this kind of stuff.
| darrmit wrote:
| I just started using Duplicati last week as my backup for ~900GB
| worth of photos, music, and other assorted data in an Ubuntu
| RAID1 array to Backblaze B2. I noticed it was a little sketchy
| when I poked at it (i.e. pausing the backup), but didn't realize
| it was so unstable. The initial backup did finish.
|
| Is restic the best option for Linux backup to B2?
| relaxman wrote:
| I recommend Arq Backup all the way https://www.arqbackup.com/
| Tepix wrote:
| A paid-for software that is not available for Linux is not a
| replacement for many.
| [deleted]
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Still beta right? What fool trusts their backups to beta
| software? I tried this many years ago and it started failing
| eventually and I gave up. As expected, it's beta.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Do all those softwares mentioned here also work with external
| harddives as "cloud"?
| npteljes wrote:
| Borg and duplicati definitely do. I use them to push my backups
| on a local samba share, but I have tested them by backing up
| just to a local folder.
| olavgg wrote:
| I use ZFS snapshots and send/replication. This has been the
| easiest and most reliable backup solution for everything. I
| especially enjoy taking backup of SQL Server with ZFS with the
| new snapshot feature in SQL Server 2022 "ALTER DATABASE
| MyDatabase SET SUSPEND_FOR_SNAPSHOT_BACKUP = ON";
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Once you get used to zfs snapshots, operating without them
| feels like developing without source control.
| aborsy wrote:
| The only issue is, there is no ZFS cloud backend other one
| (that is very expensive) and a half!
|
| Otherwise, ZFS snapshots are sweet!
| antx wrote:
| I dropped duplicati after its database got corrupted
| irreversibly. Also, recoveries were always very long.
|
| I now use restic and I'm very happy. I find it to be very
| resilient. No more database, only indexes and data packs, which
| can be repaired.
| 8bitbuddhist wrote:
| Same. Database corruption hit me after ~1.5 years and I could
| never figure out what the cause was or how to fix it. Which is
| a shame, because Duplicati looks like a great open source
| project with a lot of dev time and effort invested into it. But
| when it comes to backup software, your core functionality
| better work reliably, and Duplicati just isn't there. I since
| switched to Duplicacy and couldn't be happier.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| With me being an IT person my landlord asked for recommendations
| for doing backups. Some googling revealed duplicati and we gave
| it a go. Installation + configuration was easy and the features
| were sane. That was like 6-7 years ago and it is still running
| without issue (AFAIK ^^)
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > running without issue (AFAIK ^^)
|
| If you don't know, then it's not working. At least that should
| be your stance on backups.
| patentatt wrote:
| Have you tested restores? The problem I had with duplicati was
| that eventually restoring from a backup would take
| exponentially longer, to the point of never finishing. Maybe it
| would have eventually, but I can't wait multiple days to
| restore one file. There's a possibility it was an error or
| problem on my end, and this was a couple of years ago, so ymmv.
| bkuhns wrote:
| I'm a new user of Duplicati and so far so good, but what you
| describe sounds like their biggest issue with the original
| storage mechanism (full+huge chain of incremental backups).
| The new mechanism would likely completely fix your concern.
| Here's a brief description of how it now works on their
| website: https://www.duplicati.com/articles/Storage-Engine/
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Yes, we did test that and it worked reasonable fast (backup
| to external USB SSD)
| wbkang wrote:
| I have spent a lot of time trying out backup solutions and I feel
| strongly enough to write this to stop others from using this. As
| other commenters mentioned, Duplicati is pretty unstable. I was
| never even able to finish the initial backups (less than 2 TB) on
| my PC over many years. If you pause an ongoing backup it never
| actually works again.
|
| I'd use restic or duplicacy if you need something that works well
| both on Linux and Windows.
|
| Duplicati's advantage is that it has a nice web UI but if the
| core features don't work.. that's not very useful.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Never tried Duplicati, but restic + B2 has been great as "a
| different choice", and for my use case of backing up a variety
| of OS's (Windows, Mac, and different Linux distros, anyway),
| it's worked great.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Restic and B2 "just work". Works how I expect it to, and
| restores what I expect it to. Not amazingly fast in backups
| or restorations, but it works reliable for me. I have restic
| running on everything from workstations and laptops, (~200G
| each), to servers (500G-2TB) to a mini 'data hoard' (25TB+)
| level of backups, and its been doing great on each.
|
| I did not like and could not trust duplicati to finish
| backups or restore from them.
| phcreery wrote:
| I had a similar experience with Duplicati. I attempted a 2TB
| backup of my NAS to a cloud storage and it went up to ~500GB
| and would just hang there.
|
| I switched to restic and recomned it over Duplicati.
| alexktz wrote:
| Agree totally with this. It's a hot mess tbh and very
| unreliable. As suggested restic (with autorestic as a wrapper)
| is a great replacement.
| alyandon wrote:
| I had a very similar experience with Duplicati on a small (disk
| space wise) backup set but a very large number of files
| bloating the sqlite data store.
|
| I use Urbackup to back up Windows and Linux hosts to a server
| on my home network and then use Borg to back that up for DR.
| I'm currently in the process of testing Restic now that it has
| compression and may switch Borg out for that.
| magnetic wrote:
| What does restic offer that borg doesn't?
|
| I've been using borg for a while (successfully, with Vorta as
| UI on mac) and curious to learn if there is something I've
| been missing that restic provides.
| alyandon wrote:
| You probably aren't missing anything unless you are doing
| ridiculously large amounts of backups. I'm using Borg as a
| disaster recovery backup of a backup server.
|
| Borg has issues properly maintaining the size of its local
| cache and that results in RIDICULOUS amounts of ram being
| consumed at runtime unless I manually clear the cache out
| periodically. It also brings in some python package for
| something FUSE related that constantly vomits a warning to
| the console on each run on Ubuntu.
|
| I'm still not 100% sold on migrating to Restic. It seems to
| not suffer the same cache or FUSE problem (since it isn't
| Python) so far but the overall archive sizes seem to be a
| bit larger than Borg and I have to pay for every byte of
| storage I consume.
| m3nu wrote:
| At BorgBase.com the largest Borg repo we host is about 70
| TB. Still manageable with server-side pruning. Mostly
| larger files from what the user told me.
|
| We just added support for Restic too. Using Nginx with
| HTTP/2. Fastest combination I've seen so far. So very
| excited to offer two great options now.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The main thing I was going to mention was deletion but it
| looks like borg has that now.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I had a mixed experience. I've been able to successfully
| restore backups (the most important thing), but I frequently
| had to fix database issues, which makes the backup less
| seamless (perhaps the second most important thing).
| emptysands wrote:
| Duplicacy has worked well for several years on both my wife's
| and mother's laptops. Doesn't require much work and just keeps
| operating.
| mosselman wrote:
| Also can't recommend duplicati. I never got it to work despite
| sinking many hours into it using different storage options. Not
| even local disk worked.
|
| Instead, I'd recommend Arq backup.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| It seems hard to find a universal recommendation. I've heard
| good things about Arq although it didn't work well for me
| personally whereas ironically Duplicati did, although I'm
| currently using Restic.
| sam345 wrote:
| I recommend Arq also at least for Windows (have not tried
| on Mac). I'm using Arq 7 cloud (something like $60 a year)
| on a Windows desktop. The software is straightforward,
| generally stays out of your way, gives alerts when needed,
| reliable, saves versions similar to time machine, fairly
| configurable, and backups are end to end encrypted, and can
| be saved to Arq's own cloud service, any local media, and
| most other cloud services. I had lots of permission errors
| when starting for a small bunch of files but was able to
| fix them out by either resetting permissions or excluding
| files (e.g., caches). I think these are the kind of
| problems you can expect on Windows when using Shadow copy,
| no reflection on Arq.
| nickersonm wrote:
| I've had a good experience with Kopia [0] for over a year.
| Linux and Windows boxes all writing to the same repository,
| which is synchronized to both B2 and a portable drive every
| night. The one thing it lacks that I'd like is error
| correction, so I store it on a RAID1 btrfs system. ECC is
| apparently being developed [1], but is currently
| experimental and I believe requires a new repository.
|
| [0] https://github.com/kopia/kopia
|
| [1] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/pull/2308
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I've had issues trying to use multiple different Kopia
| repos from one machine. (A dedicated back-up server
| basically)
|
| With compression landing in the most recent Reseic
| release, I'll probably switch back to that for my
| servers. Though I'm still keeping Kopia for my clients
| where I like a GUI once in a while.
| zargon wrote:
| After hearing a lot of praise for Arq here, I tried it out
| hoping it would become my new Windows backup solution. (I'm
| looking for a linux one too, but Arq doesn't do linux). But
| I was very underwhelmed. The user experience for browsing
| file versions in time was not really there. If I recall
| correctly, I could only browse by snapshot. And it was
| extremely slow for just a few gigabytes. The backup process
| didn't inspire confidence, I was never sure if something
| had interrupted it or what the status was.
| counttheforks wrote:
| Arq on windows for me just stalled forever and didn't
| complete anything after 2-3 weeks.
| malfist wrote:
| Just to balance this. I use duplicati for both my web server
| where I host client websites, and my personal home nas.
|
| I've had to use it to restore multiple times, and have never
| had an issue with it. It's saved my ass multiple times. It's
| always been a set it and forget it until I remember I need it.
| ciupicri wrote:
| It's hard to see restic as a Duplicati replacement when there's
| no official documentation about backing data via SFTP on
| Windows.
| aborsy wrote:
| What do you mean? It's just "sftp" in front of the repository
| name!
|
| And SFTP is SFTP, regardless of the OS.
| Saris wrote:
| If you use restic/kopia, how are you managing scheduling and
| failure/success reporting together?
|
| That's one thing I can't seem to quite figure out with those
| solutions. I know there are scripts out there (or I could try
| my own), but that seems error-prone and could result in failed
| backups.
| dividuum wrote:
| You could use one of those services that expect a regular
| http heartbeat. I'm personally using uptimerobot for that.
| Within a .bat or .sh file, add a restic [...]
| && curl <heartbeat-url>
|
| and you'll get eventually notified if backup jobs fails too
| often.
| Saris wrote:
| I've tinkered with that using healthchecks, but I don't
| really trust that I know what I'm doing when setting it up.
|
| Restic is also confusing to me with forgetting snapshots
| and doing cleanup, I don't understand why that isn't run as
| part of the backup (or is it? The docs aren't clear).
| deckard1 wrote:
| no, you have to run "restic forget" with the policy you
| want (keep last X, last monthly Y, etc.) followed up with
| a "restic prune". Or you can pass "--prune" to the
| "forget" command I think.
|
| You don't always want to forget/prune snapshots.
| Especially if you're using a cloud service like B2. It
| can easily cost you more to prune than actual storage
| costs if you're not careful.
|
| See here:
| https://www.seanh.cc/2022/04/03/restic/#maintaining-your-
| bac...
|
| and
|
| https://kdecherf.com/blog/2018/12/28/restic-and-
| backblaze-b2...
| Saris wrote:
| Thanks for the links! That's helpful, the part about B2
| makes sense.
| wbkang wrote:
| Yeah I had to invent my own.
|
| On Linux I used cron + email. You can setup postfix such that
| you use your personal gmail or whatever, then you will be
| able to do "echo message" | mail -s youremail.com to send an
| email. They (big email providers) always allow you to send an
| email as yourself to yourself.
|
| On Windows, I used the native task scheduler (with various
| triggers like time, lock workstation, idle and so on) and
| send an email using powershell, which can also send emails
| using SMTP.
| minimal-o wrote:
| Same here. I have a wrapper script that runs restic
| commands. Whether I run it in a console or per crontab
| stdout/stderr is logged to a file and is emailed to me (in
| the crontab case). Nothing fancy yet, but it works and I am
| satisfied. Still pretty new to restic though. In another
| life I had a disaster recovery role and was using DLT for
| backup / restore of all the things, so ...
| antx wrote:
| yeah, I scripted my backup jobs, and use good old email
| notifications to report.
|
| I expect an email every day. If I don't receive one, I know
| there's a problem with email delivery.
| quaffapint wrote:
| Just another stat point... Been using it against 1TB storing
| encrypted to Backblaze B2 for about a year and a half. I've
| tested restoring and so far it's been very stable.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I have had similar experiences. I could not get a non-corrupt
| backup from one machine; it would repeatedly ask me to
| regenerate the local database from remote, which never
| succeeded. Oddly, another machine never seemed to have an
| issue, but that's not an argument in favor of using the
| software. It is possible there are "safe" versions, but without
| a way to identify them (all the releases I used were linked
| from the homepage).
| Ayesh wrote:
| I started to use Duplicati 2 for about a month now to try it
| out, and it was working flawlessly for me, except for
| occasional time-out of the web UI. I only backup local
| directories, and the destinations I tried out include an
| external drive over USB, Google Drive, and an SSH connection.
|
| I'm using it to backup a Firefox profile while I'm using
| Firefox. It backed up active files as they are being written
| too! I'm also using it to backup a Veracrypt container file
| (single 24GB file), and incremental backups worked quite well
| too.
|
| Thanks for the words of advice, I will keep testing longer
| before I make the switch.
| npteljes wrote:
| I read that Duplicati is also in beta (for years now), and that
| really seems discouraging. Restic looks great, but it's also
| 0.14 as of the moment. Would you consider restic a stable
| product, despite the version number?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Restic's versioning doesn't denote that it's not production-
| ready: it absolutely is. Stable, reliable and developed
| thoughtfully, with data integrity and security in mind. I
| highly recommend it.
| m3nu wrote:
| Yes, it's stable. They even added compression this year. We
| just added support for Restic on BorgBase.com. Will have more
| user feedback in a few months, but first tests and benchmarks
| are pretty encouraging.
| donio wrote:
| I've been using it since 2018, no issues so far.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| To me, it shows "beta" and "not supported" options.. so it's
| hard to choose :)
| mschulkind wrote:
| I've used restic for years now without issue. I'd definitely
| consider it stable.
|
| I started with duplicacy and moved to restic.
| r1cka wrote:
| Could you provide your reasoning for the switch? I've had
| good enough luck with duplicacy but I'm curious about it vs
| restic now that restic supports compression.
| aborsy wrote:
| Restic is rock solid. I have backed TBs servers with it. It
| never failed.
|
| Encryption is properly implemented.
| Shank wrote:
| I'll throw a +1 in for Duplicacy too. I think I'm backing up
| something like 8TB to Wasabi using it and it's excellent in
| terms of de-duplication.
| remram wrote:
| Duplicacy seems to upload every chunk as a separate
| object/file, which is great for deduplication but bad for your
| cloud bill (S3 providers usually charge for PUT requests).
| There's a reason everybody else packs up chunks.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| I did use it. It worked 90% of the time. I backed up to one-
| drive. I just ended up getting veeam.
| ajvs wrote:
| I too had huge problems with Duplicati restoring. Switched to
| Borg, using Vorta as the GUI and am much happier.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| I agree. I really liked the interface and gave it a go at least
| 3 or 4 times, and got burned every single time with errors or
| random issues.
| DCKing wrote:
| It's a shame Duplicati runs quite poorly (I have the same
| experience). I moved to restic with the autorestic wrapper and
| configured notifications through another method for both failures
| and successful backups.
|
| That second option works amazingly well and is _much_ quicker,
| more reliable, and offers more control than Duplicati. But it 's
| much harder and time consuming to set up, requiring timers,
| scripts and setting up notifictions. For new people self hosting
| stuff, reliable incremental off site backups can be a right pain.
| How many poorly tested cronjobs failing to create backups that
| nobody will take action on are running right now? At least the
| Duplicati GUI will give you a glanceable GUI showing its failures
| in backups.
| XCSme wrote:
| Last update was June 2021, is the project still maintained?
| npteljes wrote:
| There's some progress on GitHub, so I guess work is still
| ongoing.
| fattybob wrote:
| Have been using this for years, it has its quirks but it works
| and it costs me next to nothing - I keep looking at possible
| alternatives but so far haven't shifted.
| gorgabal wrote:
| These comments are becoming backup recommendations.
|
| Want to add that I have have used "back in time" for a long time,
| probably +10 years, recovery has always worked so far.
|
| Only issue is that it does not do block-level deduplication. But
| it is good enough for my laptop with external harddrive usage.
| aborsy wrote:
| I will use Restic (or Borg), in preference to Duplicati.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I strongly advise people to not rely on Duplicati. Throughout its
| history, it's had a lot of weird, fatal problems that the dev
| team has shown little interest in tracking down while there is
| endless interest in chasing yet another storage provider or other
| shiny things.
|
| Duplicati has been in desperate need of an extended feature
| freeze and someone to comb through the forums and github issues
| looking for critical archive-destroying or corrupting bugs.
|
| "If you interrupt the initial backup, your archive is corrupted,
| but silently, so you'll do months of backups, maybe even rely
| upon having those backups" was what made me throw up my hands in
| disgust. I don't know if it's still a thing; _I don 't care._ Any
| backup software that allows such a glaring bug to persist for
| months if not years has completely lost my trust.
|
| In general there seemed to be a lot of local database issues
| where it could become corrupted, you'd have no idea, and worse, a
| lot of situations seemed to be unrecoverable - even doing a
| rebuild based off the 'remote' archive would error out or
| otherwise not work.
|
| The duplicati team has exactly zero appreciation for the fact
| that backup software should be like filesystems: the most stable,
| reliable, predictable piece of software your computer runs.
|
| Also, SSD users should be aware that Duplicati assembles each
| archive object on the local filesystem. On spinning rust, it
| significantly impacts performance.
|
| Oh, and the default archive object size is comically small for
| modern day usage and will cause significant issues if you're not
| using object storage (say, a remote directory.) After just a few
| backups of a system with several hundred GB, you could end up
| with a "cripples standard linux filesystem tools" numbers of
| files in a single directory.
|
| And of course, there's no way to switch or migrate object
| sizes...
| t_sawyer wrote:
| I had a terrible experience too. The UI is incredibly slow and
| personally, I had issues where the "local db" had to be
| constantly repaired. The tool is just buggy and doesn't work
| well IMO.
|
| FWIW: I ran it on 3 separate Windows PCs for around 6 months
| without any real luck getting it to work consistently.
| npteljes wrote:
| I'm a happy user, I use it as a solution to back up specific user
| folders on a Windows system to an smb network share. It's been
| chugging along for years now, and I even have done a few
| recoveries, and never had a problem. I'm surprised to read the
| other reviews here.
| olagsv wrote:
| Does anyone have experience with using regular backup software in
| conjunction with reverse-encrypting filesystems, like gocryptfs,
| eCryptFS or encFs? ie mount the plaintext directory as a new
| reverse-ciphertext directory, and backup the cipher one:
| ./gocryptfs -reverse plain cipher
| PYTHONDJANGO wrote:
| gocryptfs works fast and good, it is the way to... go for
| encrypted backups.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I do something like this. EncFS a local clone of my data, and
| rsync that clone to remote servers.
|
| I prefer this over complex formats created by software like
| duplicati. This is easier to recover 20 years from now (I just
| went through that with a USB stick from 2001 :P )
| nanook wrote:
| Interesting that Cryptomator hasn't been mentioned so far. I've
| been thinking about about setting it up to work with my 2TB
| GDrive. Anybody know how it compares?
| yewenjie wrote:
| Has anyone tried Kopia yet? I have used restic which works pretty
| much fine yet I felt misses a few features that Kopia promises.
|
| https://kopia.io/
| bityard wrote:
| I have been using Kopia to back up all of my laptops' home dirs
| to a raspberry pi for at least a couple years now. There is a
| CLI and a UI. The UI is somewhat funky and could benefit from
| an "easy mode" a la time machine, but it does work. I recently
| restored my home dir from it just the other day when migrating
| from one OS to another. My favorite thing about Kopia is that
| it performs incremental backups on tens of GB _much_ quicker
| than plan rsync can and is much more space-efficient to boot.
| MikusR wrote:
| There is also https://kopia.io
|
| - Cross platform
|
| - GUI
|
| - Encryption/Compression/Deduplication
| marwis wrote:
| Unfortunately looks like it does not backup full metadata
| (ACLs, extended attributes, flags, alternate data streams,
| special files, etc).
|
| I wonder if there is any program that does?
| samuell wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering about how Duplicati compares to Kopia,
| which seems to check pretty much all the boxes for me.
| synergy20 wrote:
| google storage only, can it add rclone as backend to support
| other storage providers?
| bityard wrote:
| Huh? No... Kopia supports cloud object storage, google drive,
| webdav, SFTP (ssh), or it's own repository server.
| https://kopia.io/docs/repositories/
|
| I just use SFTP.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Thanks! seems great to me. It's going to switch kapio-ui
| from electron to go-binary-plus-browser, I thought its
| server already provides a browser UI, not sure why it needs
| a new desktop UI that is browser based, why both.
| AtroxDev wrote:
| Can recommend kopia as well. It is the one that I settled with
| after trying out pretty much all the other open source
| solutions (at the time).
|
| Works great across all my devices (win, mac, linux).
| beermonster wrote:
| How does it compare to Borg?
| rovr138 wrote:
| My main issue with Borg is disk space needed locally for
| backup.
|
| No idea on the rest, but the reason why I discarded it as an
| option.
| npteljes wrote:
| Borg doesn't have a Windows version, for example. Borg is also
| command line only, while Duplicati has a nice graphical UI - by
| running a web server on localhost.
| beermonster wrote:
| There is a nice GUI on MacOS called Vorta I think.
| Delk wrote:
| I've been using Vorta as a GUI for Borg for a while for
| personal use. It's not the prettiest thing out there but it
| has seemed to work fine so far. As far as restoring from old
| backup goes, though, I've only really tried that with a few
| individual files.
|
| Windows still seems to be unsupported.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Borg works great (except mounting) under Cygwin.
| stormdennis wrote:
| The fact that it's been in beta since forever means even the
| developers don't trust it themselves.
| chefandy wrote:
| My interest was piqued, so I started going through the issues
| tagged with 'bug' from oldest to newest. I got 100 in and...
| well, Jiminy Cricket... I was still in 2017. Think I'll pass.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-03 23:01 UTC)