many tools claiming to do incremental backups to the cloud at the end require or at least strongly recommend periodic full backups to the cloud. How is this with duplicati (esp agains gdrive)?
E.g. hashbackup ist perfectly fine with one full backup at the start and then only incremental backup for the rest of your backup life.
Since I have quite a bit of things to backup I would hate to have to upload TB of data every few months just so that the backup solution works.
Yes, Duplicati is an “incremental forever” backup solution. After the initial full you are never asked to do another full.
In fact Duplicati doesn’t even have these terms for backups. Each backup job just looks at new/updated files, checks for unique blocks that don’t yet exist on the back end, and then uploads those blocks.