Duplicati 2 vs. Duplicacy 2

[tophee]

@JonMikelV

it would require a huge rewrite so multiple backups could share the same destination

Okay, I was indeed wondering how it would be possible, but I guess I was hoping to much to see clearly…

There is actually a pretty good description of the challenges in cross-source deduplication and how duplicacy solves it here. Quite ingenious, actually.

@TowerBR

I think databases use is the weak point of Duplicati. It’s a very “sophisticated” approach, and though elegant, it creates several points of failure.

This is starting to dawn on me too. I have had so many issues with duplicati and basically all of them seem to be related to the database (though I can’t really tell whether the “missing 1 file in backend, please run repair” error is a db problem but since it tells me to repair the database, I guess it is.

@TowerBR

Ok, just backup the databases after each backup job with another tool, but it’s strange to back up the backup databases (?!).

Well, I think that is a viable solution (or it could be one, if duplicati took care of that by itself). But I agree, it’s definitely not a plus for duplicati.

So to boil this comparison down even further, I’d say that, at the moment, there are really only three (or maybe four) things that speak for duplicati compared to duplicacy:

1. It’s entirely open source and free
2. It uses less storage space in the backend
3. It supports a much greater number backends (though if duplicacy supports yours, that is, of course, irrelevant)

Depending on taste, you could add the UI as a fourth advantage. Personally, I really like the Web UI and the way it makes command line options available without forcing you to use the CLI.

On the minus side, duplicati is (currently)

1. slower,
2. still in beta (and rightly so),
3. unable to do cross-source deduplication (which, in my use case, is pretty nifty to have as it allows you to move large files or folders all over the place locally, without having to worry about that making your backend storage explode).

Edit: I just discovered that duplicacy allows you to change the password for your archive. I’m inclined to add this as another plus for duplicacy.

Edit2: I just discovered the very (!) basic restore functionality of duplicacy: it is very cumbersome to search for and restore a file whose exact location you don’t know. You can only do it via CLI (as described here) and even then, you have to run a separate command to then restore the identified file. Edit: Sorry, it’s not as bad. Search also works in the GUI version, but you can’t search across revisions. So the difference to duplicati is not as big, but duplicati still seems better here.