Concern about corruption and repairs

Support
1

While testing out Duplicati with Wasabi cloud storage, I’ve ran into issues which prompted me to repair. So far, it wasn’t shocking and I was able to fix it, either by clicking repair or removing some files from the destination which I knew didn’t belong there.

While going through this, I searched the forums and to be honest its quite disconcerting seeing the many reports of hanging or looping repairs.

How big of an issue is this really? When this occurs, are restores still possible? Do we know why or how this happens and are manually repairs possible to get data back from a situation like this?

Sorry for the many questions, I’m just worried. I lost data before and don’t want that happening again.

Thanks.

2

Hello,

I personally almost never have to repair a database. I use B2 but did experiment with Wasabi in the past. I don’t doubt that Wasabit is reliable.

Please make sure you are definitely not mixing any backups together (exact same back end folder location), and not storing any other data files in the destination folder. It should be dedicated to a single backup job.

1 Like
3

Duplicati.CommandLine.RecoveryTool.exe can restore damaged backups better, if repair and some other maintenance commands can’t fix things up to continue the backups. Disaster Recovery talks about these, and I would consider them manual repairs in that you’re manually using special tools, maybe with support.

When reading through the forum, keep versions in mind. Duplicati 2.0.5.1 came out in January 2020, and it breaks far less, although you apparently ran into something. It also usually runs a repair-as-recreate faster. There are a few other fixes in Canary, but that’s mostly for people willing to risk possible new bugs as well.

Usage statistics for Duplicati shows maybe 3 million backups per month, if that sets context for issue rate. Duplicati (still in Beta) is not perfect, but it’s not that bad. Don’t trust critical data to any one backup though. Although it does take more space, best practice is multiple backups that are done in quite different ways…

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4

Thanks both for your replies.

I’ve been making regular backups now and done some restores as tests. So far its been great!

I haven’t been able to make the cli work for me but I’ll get into it.

Thanks!

5

One point that confuses people is the true CLI (as opposed to GUI Commandline runs independently.
The BACKUP command explains how to use Export As Command-line for a job compatible with GUI. Typically there are a lot of CLI options needed, and if nothing else this is a way to get some seeded…