Blog post from Sia on the new Duplicati Integration

Hi all! Zach here from the Sia team. We put together a blog post and short guide for using Sia as a backup destination on Duplicati. Let me know if you have any questions!!

https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-full-computer-backup-with-sia-through-the-new-duplicati-integration-62dd17cbcfb7

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That’s a pretty awesome tutorial!

I’m not sure how close @kenkendk is to releasing a new non-Canary version so you might want to add that at the moment Sia is only available in the “Canary” version of Duplicati which may not be the best choice for anything beyond testing purposes…

Good call! Will update.

Thanks for a nice walk-through. I am new to Duplicati (but not Sia) and found the instructions helpful in configuring my first Duplicati job. Sia+Duplicate seems like a perfect match and my job completed quickly. Next up is my 5TB backup folder…

One minor thing that bugs me is that some fields appear to be prefilled with default values, but you actually need to fill out those defaults or you get an error. A bit unexpected UX right there.

Parallel uploading is also very needed. Has anyone started on that yet?

Question: Does Duplicati generate any redundancy on-disk except the zip files stored in the Sia renter folders? Are there any big temporary/permanent files stored elsewhere?

On second thought:
I considered for a few moments to also backup my large archived files through Duplicati but seems this does not make sense, as Duplicati will zip and duplicate these files in the Sia renter structure with little compression (as they are already compressed), effectively doubling the space occupied on disk.

I guess Duplicati makes more sense with complex directory structures, with lots of folders and files, small and large. Would you agree?

Yes, I noticed this myself. The examples should perhaps be an even lighter color, and maybe not show an example text, but more an explanation.

Not that I am aware of. I am working on concurrent processing, which will make it easy to add parallel uploads later.

There is no redundancy in Duplicati. There are temporary files created by the database transactions and the zip files during backups.
You can also call the local database (which is a map for the remote files on Sia) a temporary file. It is stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%Duplicati\.

You can also disable compression with something like --zip-compression-level=0, but it depends on how you want to store backups (is one version enough, does it change, etc).

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