Any suggestions on distributing Duplicati to 50 users and with a preset config?
Welcome to the forum @mala57
This is a little vague. Are you talking manual install, Group Policy, something else? What destination? Multiple backups generally shouldn’t use the same one. Does “preset” mean identical or customized?
EDIT: What OS, and is this GUI or CLI? Do you intend users to continue administration, restore, etc.?
EDIT 2: Consider how much separation of backups you want, to guard against accidents or mischief.
Thx ts678
I got 50 locations with 2-6 users per site, Mixt env Win and OSX. The backups are to be on Jottacloud. And yes identical configuration per type of PC. Not sure of how to install it remotely.
No, the users shall absolutely not have the opportunity to do any administration so I recon CLI
That’s going to be quite a job even before distribution issue. Jottacloud doesn’t want Duplicati or anything third-party. There’s no documented application program interface. API changes, thus breaks such things.
Jottacloud Error 401 (Unauthorized) is the partial recovery from latest break. Care to be in the next one?
I think macOS expertise is less common around here than Windows or Linux. User base is the smallest.
Duplicati doesn’t provide remote install, so that has to be independently invented. A corporate Windows network could probably do this easily. Do you have any remote access currently to the remote systems?
Is there some other plan for restoring files routinely? Is this maybe just an attempt at disaster protection? Regardless, CLI is less tempting to tamper with, but not inherently immune to what a user might attempt. Running something without a tray icon (e.g. the server alone) can slow them down too, as they’d need to browse manually to Duplicati, and you can slow them down further by putting a password on admin GUI.
Someone may need to do administration somehow. It’s even possible that a repair to backup is needed. That’s lots easier in the GUI, although the CLI can probably do it all, assuming that one can figure it out.
You can’t set 100% identical configurations, all backing up to one folder on top of each other’s backups. They can be similar though, and you can decide how similar depending on how much you trust users to not interfere with each other. An actual malicious user may be the worst, but accidents can happen too.
I never tested it, especially not for Duplicati, but I think that generally the Windows installer file type (MSI) has built-in support for command line (automated) installing. I know that it is used for Windows domain scripted deployment.
[REQ] Add parameters for MSI installer options #3892 and related pull requests added some features potentially useful to scripted install if that winds up being the choice, but I have no idea about macOS.
If this winds up CLI scheduled by Task Manager, cron, launchd, etc., configuration is either on lines, or parameters-file defines. GUI can export for Duplicati.CommandLine.ConfigurationImporter.exe
Yes Windows domain would have been easier. One could even backup to a home directory drive letter provided by IT department, with each user having the same letter, and remote NAS backed up as well.
That would have reduced the user-separation problem faced here, but I still lack the entire picture of it.
I’m hoping there’s some current remote management story to build from. Inventing one is out of scope. There are tools available, including commercial. There are also commercial backups that might work…
Ill give it a try. Thx