Backup as raw files

Support
1

Hi!

I plan to use Duplicati to backup ~15.000 pictures to an external hard drive. Reguarly a backup will be triggered to backup recent additions.
Until now I used Areca, but the software isn’t developed anymore it seems. I use Duplicati for backing up my university notes since 1,5 years, without problems. Those files aren’t that important but the pictures I want to backup now are really important and have emotional value. Until now I copied all pictures to other hard drives to be extra safe.

I wonder if there is an option in Duplicati to backup the files just as they are. The only task of the backup software would be to check for new files and add them to the external harddrive.
Is Duplicati the right tool for this? Or can anyone recommend me something better fitting?

2

Duplicati is not the right tool if you want backups to be in native format. Instead you may want to use robocopy (Windows) or rsync (Linux) to make exact mirrors of data.

3

For “really important” files, you should have a remote copy in case a local disaster occurs.

You should also have multiple backups, and not rely solely on Duplicati, which is still Beta.

rclone would be one way to do that manually, even remotely.

There are lots of sync programs around, but sync risks sync of file damage from malware.
You should either have to manually do an action, or have some way to undo any damage.

If you try rclone to remote, unattended, –backup-dir might give you a way to do such undo.
Syncthing versioning might also do. See old post Duplicati vs. Syncthing (with versioning).
Office 365 version of OneDrive also has recovery to previous time, for malware protection.

I don’t use any of above because my needs are different, Yours is sort of a special case…

4

Thanks, I’ll have a look at these tools.