I’m running Duplicati as a service on my Windows 10 machine, and it has been working just fine for more than a year. But when i opened the web interface today it told me that i should think about setting a password (even though i absolutely had set one), and all my backup jobs were gone (fortunately, i had exported them)
I last checked a few months ago, so i don’t know exactly when it happened, but i suspect it was probably a Windows update.
Is there any chance of restoring my old configuration?
Did you install Duplicati as a Windows Service? This isn’t the standard install method, but some people have done it.
There is a known issue with Windows 10 semi-annual updates removing the profile area for service accounts. If you still have a C:\Windows.old folder then we can probably save your Duplicati configuration.
If you did NOT install Duplicati as a service, then something else may have happened.
Yes, i installed it as a service because i wanted to use the shadow-copy feature. Unfortunately, there is no Windows.old on my hard drive, so i guess that means i’m out of luck
I hope that changing the location of the config folder is sufficient to prevent something like that happening again
Your backup config is lost but hopefully you recorded all the pertinent information. If you recreate a new backup job with the same config, you can then rebuild the database and resume backups.
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to install as a service to use shadow copy. Duplicati just needs to run elevated. I do this on my system by using Task Scheduler to launch Duplicati elevated at logon. Others do it by modifying the Startup shortcut and checking the “Run as administrator” box (this method does trigger a UAC prompt, unlike the Task Manager method).
If you still do want to install as a service, then search the forum for “Windows.old” for threads where this issue was previously discussed so you can see how to avoid the problem in the future.
I do have backups of all the job configurations, so it’s quite easy to get them up and running again (rebuilding the database seems to take half an eternity though, probably because i’m using S3 Glacier).
I will definitely have duplicati send me email reports or something in the future. I don’t want to get in a situation where i need my backups, only to realize they haven’t been running for months.
Unfortunately the contents of the System Profile folder is still moved to Windows.old when performing a semi-annual Windows update. The Windows.old folder is deleted automatically a month after the update is installed. IMO this is a bug and should be solved before the next semi-annual update.
As long as this bug exists, losing your configuration can be avoided using the --portable-mode option (See Duplicati.Server.exe). This will place all configuration files and local databases in a subfolder data under the program folder, leaving the System Profile folder untouched.
I agree, it needs to be fixed. I think Duplicati should be changed so that when it’s running under the localsystem context it saves to C:\ProgramData instead of localsystem’s “profile.”
Great info, personally i did not know about this, i use Duplicati just about week ago and i have learned a lot in the forum.
So i think its simple to solve this “bug”, next duplicati release it could make --portable-mode as default option.
Not super simple. Just changing the location instantly breaks anybody who was on the previous one - pretty much the experience you had, thanks to Windows, but I do think it’s important to do something.
I’m also seeing some Internet opinions that like keeping this data under C:\ProgramData for SYSTEM, which is really the problem case. For ordinary users (and multiple users can run Duplicati at one time), their user profile is fine. The problem is that the SYSTEM user profile gets wiped out by Microsoft, and actually I think you only get 10 days by default to grab whatever files you need from C:\Windows.old…
I did not have that experience fortunately, but i came comment here because i thought it was very important to know, and now i know how to avoid this situation.
And sure, the fix its not so simple for the reason what you mean, i meaned like “a logic fix”. A possible fix may be afect just for new instalations, for exist instalations would not make changes, and fix need to do manually.
Anyway, probably for an automatic fix for exist instalations may be always a problem, because it needs change/transfer data and probably is not a linear thing.
