I just set up Duplicati on my Unraid instance backing up to Backblaze B2. I set up to run twice a week and store all backups within past 7 days, 1 backup per week for the next 4 weeks, and 1 backup per month for 12 months. My initial upload was 26Gb and ran for over 8 hours (5.5mb/s transfer speed… not great.)
I read a bit about Duplicati 2.0’s backup methods but I am wondering and just want some clarification… When the next scheduled backup runs, will it be sending all 26Gb again? or just the delta? or something in between that?
I ask because I can’t saturate my upload bandwidth for 9 hours several times a week, It’s just too impactful.
Incremental backups
Duplicati performs a full backup initially. Afterwards, Duplicati updates the initial backup by adding the changed data only. That means, if only tiny parts of a huge file have changed, only those tiny parts are added to the backup. This saves time and space and the backup size usually grows slowly.
Unlike some backup programs, the delta is organized around blocks, not entire file if a part of it changed.
throttle-upload or the GUI throttle control can solve that (extra help is needed if you’re going to OneDrive).
2.0.5.1 Beta (latest now) also has a bug where upload throttling also throttles download. Fixed next Beta.