This is actually one of my personal wishes, and a variation of it would be to see if there’s an easy way
to at least get a user in the Administrators group elevated without a UAC prompt to answer. I’ve found workarounds such as Task Scheduler, but nothing too appealing. The other path to VSS is the service.
You can likely start the service without reboot, but that might be a small point on your main point, which surprisingly seems missing from forum feature requests although there’s a GitHub discussion below at
Duplicati Tray Icon Silently Dies with --no-hosted-server arg #3137 talking about how to monitor service, because as far as I know a service can’t interact with the user the way a user-started application can…
What would be nice would be an installer that sets up the right pieces, basically service plus a TrayIcon with –no-hosted-server, but this doesn’t work with UI passwords because TrayIcon requires DB access which it ordinarily doesn’t have (service typically runs as the SYSTEM user, denying access to ordinary).
Running as SYSTEM giving a web GUI also raises security risk, as a compromised web server is worse.
Possibly your system architect background makes you aware of such issues. See any simple solutions?
Making complex systems easy can be hard, and Duplicati has a lot of moving parts that need to interact.
It’s extremely flexible, but flexibility gets in the way of ease of use, maybe until an installer can set it all up,
but part of the widespread volunteer shortages that I mentioned is lack of expertise in Windows installers.
Duplicati Tutorial 02 Install Duplicati as a Service is a somewhat old video that I think still fits (because of lack of people to change it and ruin the fit). One can quibble about settings, but you can develop favorites.
–portable-mode as used there is one way to keep Windows version updates from wiping Duplicati config into Windows.old (then soon deleting). There are other ways (e.g. --server-datafolder) to avoid this issue.
Migrating from User to Service install on Windows is a way-too-long discussion on the Windows wipeout.
It’s best not to put multiple feature requests in a topic, because it gets hidden from users and developers.
Device mount detection (USB or otherwise) is one previous discussion, and there are likely some others.