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Duplicati: Free backup software to store encrypted backups online

278 points by memorable 4y ago

kavalg 4y ago
- 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/ https://restic.net/
- jsmith99 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You may be referring to this page: https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy If you scroll down, below the benchmarks, it lists features and comparisons with other options.
    - rovr138 4y ago
      https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy#comparison-with-other-backup-tools https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy#comparison-with-oth...
nimbius 4y ago
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/Duplicity_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati edit: oh boy, need another cup of coffee. im entirely wrong. thinking of duplicacy https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/ which comes with a slick paid frontend.
- voidmain0001 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  How is it paid? It's fully open-source, LGPL licensed, and from the website the only payment options are donations.
- jsmith99 4y ago
  A more accurate description might be that Duplicati is a free open source Windows version of Duplicity. It works pretty well, by the way.
- cpach 4y ago
  If it’s any comfort, you’re not the first one to confuse these programs…
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  re: edit: duplicacy is also free and open source for just the CLI version ( https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/releases https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/releases ) , the 'slick paid frontend' is optional and sold by https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/ and even then is free "to restore, check, copy, or prune existing backups"
  - rovr138 4y ago
    > duplicacy is also free and open source for just the CLI version Not what I see. From the website, https://duplicacy.com/buy.html 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.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE... > Copyright © 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.
macropin 4y ago
Not to be confused with duplicity, or duplicacy backup programs which have similar features.
- ahnick 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
  - Normille 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Make a script!
      - wartijn_ 4y ago
        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-the-key-to-gradual-automation/ https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
        Normille 4y ago
        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'!
        4y ago
ElDji 4y ago
I'm using restic on servers, Kopia on pc/mac
- alexktz 4y ago
  Restic is absolutely great. Wrap it in Autorestic and it's even better! https://autorestic.vercel.app/ https://autorestic.vercel.app/
  - jacooper 4y ago
    The problem with autorestic is its development is pretty slow. Many PRs are still not merged, and there are very few commits.
  - Saris 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    I've had a good experience with [crestic](https://github.com/nils-werner/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.
  - hjuutilainen 4y ago
    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/ https://creativeprojects.github.io/resticprofile/
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  I use Kopia + Backblaze with linux. No problems so far.
Phelinofist 4y ago
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 ^^)
- patentatt 4y ago
  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.
  - Phelinofist 4y ago
    Yes, we did test that and it worked reasonable fast (backup to external USB SSD)
  - bkuhns 4y ago
    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/ https://www.duplicati.com/articles/Storage-Engine/
  - rekabis 4y ago
    The one full-backup restore I did on my wife’s system - after her MacBook Air decided to fry its storage (it was obsolete anyhow) - went perfectly. 23Gb of personal files (she’s not the data pack rat I am) came streaming back down inside of 20 hrs. And we were on a much slower connection at the time, certainly not the symmetrical gigabit that we have now.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > running without issue (AFAIK ^^) If you don't know, then it's not working. At least that should be your stance on backups.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
MikusR 4y ago
There is also https://kopia.io https://kopia.io - Cross platform - GUI - Encryption/Compression/Deduplication
- samuell 4y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about how Duplicati compares to Kopia, which seems to check pretty much all the boxes for me.
- synergy20 4y ago
  google storage only, can it add rclone as backend to support other storage providers?
  - bityard 4y ago
    Huh? No... Kopia supports cloud object storage, google drive, webdav, SFTP (ssh), or it's own repository server. https://kopia.io/docs/repositories/ https://kopia.io/docs/repositories/ I just use SFTP.
    - synergy20 4y ago
      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 4y ago
  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).
- marwis 4y ago
  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?
relaxman 4y ago
I recommend Arq Backup all the way https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Tepix 4y ago
  A paid-for software that is not available for Linux is not a replacement for many.
Double_a_92 4y ago
Do all those softwares mentioned here also work with external harddives as "cloud"?
- npteljes 4y ago
  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.
fattybob 4y ago
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.
beermonster 4y ago
How does it compare to Borg?
- npteljes 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    There is a nice GUI on MacOS called Vorta I think.
  - Delk 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    Borg works great (except mounting) under Cygwin.
- rovr138 4y ago
  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.
waynesonfire 4y ago
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.
olavgg 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Once you get used to zfs snapshots, operating without them feels like developing without source control.
- aborsy 4y ago
  The only issue is, there is no ZFS cloud backend other one (that is very expensive) and a half! Otherwise, ZFS snapshots are sweet!
wbkang 4y ago
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.
- alexktz 4y ago
  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.
- quaffapint 4y ago
  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.
- mosselman 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
Tepix 4y ago
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(§) $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. -- § https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#473 https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#473
- _cenw 4y ago
  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 https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    > It's pretty hard to beat Hetzner Storage Boxes They had a recent change in pricing ... did you take that into account?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    The data resiliency is pretty weak. Its only a single Raid cluster away from losing data.
    - _cenw 4y ago
      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.
  - aborsy 4y ago
    Does Hetzner have a service that nigh work for ZFS receive (beyond dedicated server)?
- thesimon 4y ago
  Cheap and dirty: Office 365 family plan with 6 account a 1TB each for around $60/year.
antx 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
XCSme 4y ago
Last update was June 2021, is the project still maintained?
- npteljes 4y ago
  There's some progress on GitHub, so I guess work is still ongoing.
npteljes 4y ago
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 4y ago
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
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  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 )
- PYTHONDJANGO 4y ago
  gocryptfs works fast and good, it is the way to... go for encrypted backups.
flamebreath447 4y ago
I still use Backblaze for this kind of stuff.
kidsil 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Does anyone have experience with comparing restic and Rclone? I feel like they are similar. * https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
  - dave78 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Thanks!
  - seized 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
yewenjie 4y ago
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/ https://kopia.io/
- bityard 4y ago
  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.
darrmit 4y ago
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?
BeetleB 4y ago
I recommend duply[1]. It is a frontend for duplicity: https://duply.net/Duply_(simple_duplicity) https://duply.net/Duply_(simple_duplicity)
willriches 4y ago
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-choosing-sizes-in-duplicati/ https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/appendix-c-choosi...
- jacooper 4y ago
  Thanks for the note!
gorgabal 4y ago
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.
nanook 4y ago
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?
GekkePrutser 4y ago
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
lgunsch 4y ago
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 4y ago
Just use restic and reclone and be done with it. https://bobek.cz/blog/2020/restic-rclone/ https://bobek.cz/blog/2020/restic-rclone/
- bakugo 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You would want to tune the pack size, https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/047_tuning_backup_parameters.html https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/047_tuning_backup_pa...
- dimatura 4y ago
  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).
l33tman 4y ago
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 4y ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_programs https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_...
kurtreed 4y ago
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.
aborsy 4y ago
I will use Restic (or Borg), in preference to Duplicati.
DCKing 4y ago
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.
stormdennis 4y ago
The fact that it's been in beta since forever means even the developers don't trust it themselves.
chefandy 4y ago
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.
rroot 4y ago
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 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
- sendfoods 4y ago
  I use borg with a Hetzner storage box [0]. Works very well for me. [0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us
- ajvs 4y ago
  +1 with Vorta as the GUI frontend. Much more reliable and performant than Duplicati and Duplicacy which I used to use.
qkhhly 4y ago
the thing that made me wanting to post is this bullshit: Download Duplicati 2.0 (beta) or Look at 1.3.4 (not supported) i work at a big tech and see this all the time, if your "new shinny promotion ready" version is not ready, why the hell would you drop support for the old version that works? i'd stay away from any of this products operating by this irresponsible teams. yeah, i know, lots of biased guesses/views and sentiments on my part but you get how much this angers me.
- mekster 4y ago
  If you're a big tech and even considered using duplicati, you should look around more.
tekeous 4y ago
I don’t use it. I’ve tried, and it’s a large, bloated, unstable program in Docker and when installing natively there’s more dependencies than there is actual backup software. It would quadruple the size of my install on RasPi. I use restic on servers and Syncthing set to one-way sync for basic folders.

278 points by memorable 4y ago

- 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/ https://restic.net/

jsmith99 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You may be referring to this page: https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy If you scroll down, below the benchmarks, it lists features and comparisons with other options.
  - rovr138 4y ago
    https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy#comparison-with-other-backup-tools https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy#comparison-with-oth...

nimbius 4y ago

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/Duplicity_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati edit: oh boy, need another cup of coffee. im entirely wrong. thinking of duplicacy https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/ which comes with a slick paid frontend.

voidmain0001 4y ago
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 4y ago
How is it paid? It's fully open-source, LGPL licensed, and from the website the only payment options are donations.
jsmith99 4y ago
A more accurate description might be that Duplicati is a free open source Windows version of Duplicity. It works pretty well, by the way.
cpach 4y ago
If it’s any comfort, you’re not the first one to confuse these programs…
seltzered_ 4y ago
re: edit: duplicacy is also free and open source for just the CLI version ( https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/releases https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/releases ) , the 'slick paid frontend' is optional and sold by https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/ and even then is free "to restore, check, copy, or prune existing backups"
- rovr138 4y ago
  > duplicacy is also free and open source for just the CLI version Not what I see. From the website, https://duplicacy.com/buy.html 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.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE... > Copyright © 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.

macropin 4y ago

Not to be confused with duplicity, or duplicacy backup programs which have similar features.

ahnick 4y ago
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 https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
- Normille 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Make a script!
    - wartijn_ 4y ago
      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-the-key-to-gradual-automation/ https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
      - Normille 4y ago
        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'!
        4y ago

ElDji 4y ago

I'm using restic on servers, Kopia on pc/mac

alexktz 4y ago
Restic is absolutely great. Wrap it in Autorestic and it's even better! https://autorestic.vercel.app/ https://autorestic.vercel.app/
- jacooper 4y ago
  The problem with autorestic is its development is pretty slow. Many PRs are still not merged, and there are very few commits.
- Saris 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  I've had a good experience with [crestic](https://github.com/nils-werner/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.
- hjuutilainen 4y ago
  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/ https://creativeprojects.github.io/resticprofile/
b0afc375b5 4y ago
I use Kopia + Backblaze with linux. No problems so far.

Phelinofist 4y ago

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 ^^)

patentatt 4y ago
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.
- Phelinofist 4y ago
  Yes, we did test that and it worked reasonable fast (backup to external USB SSD)
- bkuhns 4y ago
  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/ https://www.duplicati.com/articles/Storage-Engine/
- rekabis 4y ago
  The one full-backup restore I did on my wife’s system - after her MacBook Air decided to fry its storage (it was obsolete anyhow) - went perfectly. 23Gb of personal files (she’s not the data pack rat I am) came streaming back down inside of 20 hrs. And we were on a much slower connection at the time, certainly not the symmetrical gigabit that we have now.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> running without issue (AFAIK ^^) If you don't know, then it's not working. At least that should be your stance on backups.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

MikusR 4y ago

There is also https://kopia.io https://kopia.io - Cross platform - GUI - Encryption/Compression/Deduplication

samuell 4y ago
Yeah, I was wondering about how Duplicati compares to Kopia, which seems to check pretty much all the boxes for me.
synergy20 4y ago
google storage only, can it add rclone as backend to support other storage providers?
- bityard 4y ago
  Huh? No... Kopia supports cloud object storage, google drive, webdav, SFTP (ssh), or it's own repository server. https://kopia.io/docs/repositories/ https://kopia.io/docs/repositories/ I just use SFTP.
  - synergy20 4y ago
    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 4y ago
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).
marwis 4y ago
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?

relaxman 4y ago

I recommend Arq Backup all the way https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Tepix 4y ago
A paid-for software that is not available for Linux is not a replacement for many.

Double_a_92 4y ago

Do all those softwares mentioned here also work with external harddives as "cloud"?

npteljes 4y ago
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.

fattybob 4y ago

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.

beermonster 4y ago

How does it compare to Borg?

npteljes 4y ago
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 4y ago
  There is a nice GUI on MacOS called Vorta I think.
- Delk 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  Borg works great (except mounting) under Cygwin.
rovr138 4y ago
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.

waynesonfire 4y ago

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.

olavgg 4y ago

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 4y ago
Once you get used to zfs snapshots, operating without them feels like developing without source control.
aborsy 4y ago
The only issue is, there is no ZFS cloud backend other one (that is very expensive) and a half! Otherwise, ZFS snapshots are sweet!

wbkang 4y ago

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.

alexktz 4y ago
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.
quaffapint 4y ago
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.
mosselman 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

Tepix 4y ago

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(§) $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. -- § https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#473 https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#473

_cenw 4y ago
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 https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > It's pretty hard to beat Hetzner Storage Boxes They had a recent change in pricing ... did you take that into account?
- jacooper 4y ago
  The data resiliency is pretty weak. Its only a single Raid cluster away from losing data.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    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.
- aborsy 4y ago
  Does Hetzner have a service that nigh work for ZFS receive (beyond dedicated server)?
thesimon 4y ago
Cheap and dirty: Office 365 family plan with 6 account a 1TB each for around $60/year.

antx 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

XCSme 4y ago

Last update was June 2021, is the project still maintained?

npteljes 4y ago
There's some progress on GitHub, so I guess work is still ongoing.

npteljes 4y ago

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 4y ago

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

GekkePrutser 4y ago
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 )
PYTHONDJANGO 4y ago
gocryptfs works fast and good, it is the way to... go for encrypted backups.

flamebreath447 4y ago

I still use Backblaze for this kind of stuff.

kidsil 4y ago

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 4y ago
Does anyone have experience with comparing restic and Rclone? I feel like they are similar. * https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
- dave78 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Thanks!
- seized 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.

yewenjie 4y ago

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/ https://kopia.io/

bityard 4y ago
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.

darrmit 4y ago

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?

BeetleB 4y ago

I recommend duply[1]. It is a frontend for duplicity: https://duply.net/Duply_(simple_duplicity) https://duply.net/Duply_(simple_duplicity)

willriches 4y ago

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-choosing-sizes-in-duplicati/ https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/appendix-c-choosi...

jacooper 4y ago
Thanks for the note!

gorgabal 4y ago

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.

nanook 4y ago

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?

GekkePrutser 4y ago

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

lgunsch 4y ago

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 4y ago

Just use restic and reclone and be done with it. https://bobek.cz/blog/2020/restic-rclone/ https://bobek.cz/blog/2020/restic-rclone/

bakugo 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You would want to tune the pack size, https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/047_tuning_backup_parameters.html https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/047_tuning_backup_pa...
dimatura 4y ago
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).

l33tman 4y ago

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 4y ago

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_programs https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_...

kurtreed 4y ago

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.

aborsy 4y ago

I will use Restic (or Borg), in preference to Duplicati.

DCKing 4y ago

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.

stormdennis 4y ago

The fact that it's been in beta since forever means even the developers don't trust it themselves.

chefandy 4y ago

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.

rroot 4y ago

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 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg

sendfoods 4y ago
I use borg with a Hetzner storage box [0]. Works very well for me. [0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us
ajvs 4y ago
+1 with Vorta as the GUI frontend. Much more reliable and performant than Duplicati and Duplicacy which I used to use.

qkhhly 4y ago

the thing that made me wanting to post is this bullshit: Download Duplicati 2.0 (beta) or Look at 1.3.4 (not supported) i work at a big tech and see this all the time, if your "new shinny promotion ready" version is not ready, why the hell would you drop support for the old version that works? i'd stay away from any of this products operating by this irresponsible teams. yeah, i know, lots of biased guesses/views and sentiments on my part but you get how much this angers me.

mekster 4y ago
If you're a big tech and even considered using duplicati, you should look around more.

tekeous 4y ago

I don’t use it. I’ve tried, and it’s a large, bloated, unstable program in Docker and when installing natively there’s more dependencies than there is actual backup software. It would quadruple the size of my install on RasPi. I use restic on servers and Syncthing set to one-way sync for basic folders.