Writing “ps -ef | grep -i Duplicati” in Terminal gives 3 entries, confirming that the Duplicati service is running, but according to the daily notification emails from https://www.duplicati-monitoring.com/ , the daily scheduled backup has not run since the last time Ubuntu 18.04 had to be restarted.
But the moment I run the Duplicati app, to get the icon in the system tray, in order to login to the Duplicati web-interface, the backup starts.
The web-interface confirms that the scheduled daily backups have not run for 3 days.
I can add that I use the https://www.duplicati-monitoring.com/ email notification service mainly because I couldn’t get Duplicati’s own built in email notification to work.
Is it possible the service is running as root while you’re starting the app as your own user?
The configuration is not shared so it’s possible the root users configuration is empty and therefore doesn’t run any backups.
I don’t know… And I don’t know how to check that. But first and foremost I don’t understand why a backup program - like Duplicati - would make me create a ‘dummy’ configuration - a fake ‘facade’ configuration… That does not make sense to me…
There isn’t a facade. If one is running as root and the other as your user then it’s just a misconfigured setup. Each instance is isolated to the user it’s running under, which is the expected behavior.
When you’re looking at the output of ps -ef | grep -i Duplicati the first word on each line will be the user that said process is running under.
ps -ef | grep duplicati
root 27512 1 0 Jul12 ? 00:00:00 DuplicatiServer /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe
root 27968 27512 3 Jul12 ? 07:25:51 /usr/bin/mono-sgen /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe
Check the user when the service is running and when you launch the app manually. If you’ve configured Duplicati under your own user, and it’s running as root, then you’ll want to update the service file to start Duplicati as your user.
You can change the service configuration by editing /lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service. Adding User=your_username in the [Service] section and running sudo systemctl daemon-reload and sudo systemctl restart duplicati.service
The file will then look something like this:
[Unit]
Description=Duplicati web-server
After=network.target
[Service]
Nice=19
IOSchedulingClass=idle
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/duplicati
ExecStart=/usr/bin/duplicati-server $DAEMON_OPTS
Restart=always
User=your_username
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
but by default User= is omitted so the service runs as root:
Thank you very much.
After doing your instructions I can see that Duplicati service changed from running as “root” to run as ‘me’. I hope this solves the problem…
But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel that Duplicati has misled me through a fake configuration procedure. It’s probably not an intentional deception, but I still think it’s a huge error in the Duplicati system.
It’s something that indicates that Duplicati is for nerds and IT administrators and not for the average PC user. 
Please let us know if @Pectojin’s suggestion did solve your problem
As for the setup procedure, yes - it can be a bit confusing with the service vs. tray-icon difference. There has been some discussion about how to make it easier, but I don’t think there’s been any time to actual work on it. 
Yes! According to an email last night from https://www.duplicati-monitoring.com/ the scheduled daily backup is now running even though Ubuntu has been restarted recently. Thank you!
Glad to hear it’s working for you! 