Even though I delete and recreate the DB every time it says there is a deviation. I deleted all the backups and started from scratch, same thing. Is this a known issue or what?
You’re running Duplicati with - 2.2.0.3 - 2.2.0.3_stable_2026-01-06
Currently just testing the software, but that is driving me crazy
Same here. I’ve got a backup that runs overnight every night, and every morning I wake up to the same two extremely unhelpful deviation error emails.
The first says “The backup has an unexpected duration in the latest run.” … was it too long? too short? What duration were you expecting?
Then that is followed by a second email that says “The backup has an unexpected number of modified files in the latest run” … again, very unhelpful. How many modified files were you expecting? How many were there?
Neither of the emails give me any clue what I am supposed to do about these errors.
I’ve been testing Duplicati for about a week and this isn’t filling me with confidence.
Hi @John_Estep and @mab, welcome to the forum 
Can you share the exact deviation message? Duplicati itself should not show such messages, but without the actual message it is hard to say.
This sounds like you are triggering the backup monitoring feature of the Duplicati console.
You can modify the sensitivity here:
https://app.duplicati.com/app/alert-center/settings
If you have larger deviations you can increase the threshold. You can also delete the monitoring rule if you don’t want to use it. Alternative is to edit the email channel and not deliver these messages by email.
The default numbers are picked to fit regular observed patterns, but if your backups are not regular this monitoring will give false positives.
We have detected a deviation with machine XXXXX running XXXXXX.
The backup has an unexpected number of modified files in the latest run.
That’s it, nothing else. Not helpful at all
Deleting the backup will at least cause it to not run as expected, so that will trigger a missed backup email.
We have a fallback that sends the message even if the detailed data is not present, with the thinking that it is better to notify that drop the message.
However, it should only happen in extreme cases where the system cannot handle the load, so I will check up and see why you get the messages without details.
It was this
The backup was expected to have
8.42
modified files but had
13.00
which exceeds the 20% threshold.
But, the files/ folders I am backing up could be way more than that so I just upped the values. I will know today if that fixed
UPDATE: Yep no email today for deviation!!!