I have successfully (I thought) installed Duplicati on a Linux MINT (Tina) system. Duplicati appears in the system menu:
However, when I click the menu item NOTHING happens. I account seem to see anyway to actually ‘run’ duplicati… I am sure it is something I am doing wrong. I configured Duplicati to backup my Win 10 system to Dropbox, but cannot get past step one on MINT. Relatively new to Duplicati and very new to Linux MINT.
Any suggestions welcome.
Kevin
I don’t use linux mint, I’m an Arch user
I had to use systemctl enable --now duplicati or systemctl enable --user duplicati
I hope this is of some help
As a relative noob I’m sort of doing verbatim your suggestion, but get an error “unknown operation duplicate”.
So still open to any suggestions?
Kevin
EDIT:
After some Dr Google research, it turns out you were pretty close:
For anyone else that wants to run Duplicati on one of the DEB varieties of Linux including MINT here’s the link:
Duplicati on Debian (Mint Ubuntu etc)
And here’s the commands:
Duplicati is installed as a service, meaning it runs in the background. However, duplicati won’t automatically start after installation. You can start it by issuing the following command in terminal.
sudo systemctl start duplicati
Run the following command to enable auto-start at boot time.
sudo systemctl enable duplicati
Now you can check its status with:
systemctl status duplicati
And here’s the result.
kevin@OREX-SERVER:~$ sudo systemctl enable duplicati
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/duplicati.service → /lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service.
kevin@OREX-SERVER:~$ systemctl status duplicati
● duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service; enabled; vendor preset
Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-11-19 09:21:40 AEDT; 46s ago
Main PID: 16319 (Main)
Tasks: 17 (limit: 4915)
CGroup: /system.slice/duplicati.service
├─16319 DuplicatiServer /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe
└─16323 /usr/bin/mono-sgen /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe
Nov 19 09:21:40 OREX-SERVER systemd[1]: Started Duplicati web-server.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction:)
Kevin
so glad you got it sorted and sorry I was not close enough to sort it without Dr Google 
Also it might save you some heart ache, I’ve discovered that my 1st backup has to be small e.g a few hundred MB.
then after that first one I could backup all my data as much as I could throw at it.
I’m still not sure as to why, If I knew this months ago it would have saved me distress of losing my data to another well known popular paid service backup system that failed to restore.
anyway Happy backup-ing. 
That’s quite odd! You shouldn’t have to do that. Just the other week I started a fresh backup of ~250GB and it completed without issue (just took a while…)
So whilst the system says Duplicati is running, when I click the Duplicati menu item the cursor disappears for a while and then turns, but there is no Duplicati application and nothing n the MINT system tray.
On further inspection of the documentation, its says that MONO needs to be install? From the prerequisites:
Duplicati depends on other software. For Windows, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.2 or higher needs to be installed. Linux and Mac OS X require Mono to be installed.
aaaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!!!
OK, so I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can install mono from the software installer. The mono install seems to be hung, it’s just sitting there at 100% complete, but when I try to kill the installer it asks whether I want to terminate with operations current? So leaving it for a while…
So stopped and started the mono install and instead of getting to 100% immediately, the progress bar is simply oscillating from one side to the other. My guess is there is an issue with this install because it just isn’t happening. This was always the issue I had with moving to linux previously that, at some point, you were going to be popping a command prompt and be up to your elbows in sudo crap… Rant mode off.
OK., so you cannot just install mono-complete from the package manager (dooh!!!), you must first install mono (confused, yes I am):
So I’m still getting the never ending installing progress bar. I will try and do it EXACTLY the way the webpage says and not use the available package manager.
So I have now mono-complete. There is a package called mono-complete, but it also shows half a gig ++ of other packages. So I selected all for install, this is about 15minutes to download etc (quite a journey this is becoming).
So I have installed mono complete and everything in the right hand screen, so there can be no dependencies left ou. Reboot the system and nothing. OK, start from scratch, a complete removal of duplicate etc etc.
Yep mono is definitely a requirement for running Duplicati on a non-Windows system. Duplicati should start after mono is installed.
I don’t use mint but I am a Debian user. I believe I selected the package called “mono-runtime” for installation, and it automatically grabbed all the other required files.
So I think MONO is installed and I get this from Duplicati (which seems to indicate that it’s running), but, again, I click Duplicati and nothing:
duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-11-19 13:42:58 AEDT; 19min ago
Main PID: 988 (Main)
Tasks: 15 (limit: 4915)
CGroup: /system.slice/duplicati.service
├─ 988 DuplicatiServer /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe
└─2032 /usr/bin/mono-sgen /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exeNov 19 13:42:58 OREX-SERVER systemd[1]: Started Duplicati web-server.
Nov 19 13:49:11 OREX-SERVER systemd[1]: duplicati.service: Current command vanished from the unit file, exe
I’m not entirely sure what “Current command vanished from the unit file, exe” means, but it doesn’t sound good.
Is there a log file I can look at to at least get an idea of why Duplicati is failing?
Kevin
Looks like it’s running. What happens when you go to its web interface: http://localhost:8200
That’s just where I have come from and it works from the web interface. So whatever the ‘application’ is that does NOT work. The web interface definitely does (thanks for that).
That’s all I need, I can setup the backup and be happy:)
Kevin
At most that icon should just launch a web browser to take you to that URL. Not sure why it doesn’t do anything on your machine.
I thought it was odd too, but I would set off my 1.5TB+ backup and go to bed, come back in the morning to some error or other (can’t remember what now) that repair & delete and repair wouldn’t fix.
but I discovered via trial and error i created a small backup first this maybe created the database or something. but it wouldn’t fail.
I should have asked for help sooner but, Hindsight is a fantastic thing but I suffer from crippling form of anxiety so the thought of asking for help and it proving to be user error or something was too much.
FWIW I have setup my backup to Dropbox of 1TB ++ Linux Mint system. I have 2Tb of Dropbox sitting there. It will take a week or so I’m thinking (couple of large active VMs for JIRA and other stuff). The VMs are win10. I could back those up internally but I’d rather be able to restore a complete VM.
The backup starts at 0100 my tine UTC -11. I will post progress and, if I experience the same behaviour, ie. the initial
Backup screws up, I’ll advise accordingly (or otherwise).
Just happy I finally got Duplicati running.
Kevin
And just to complete the loop:
I scheduled the Duplicati backup at 0100. I have files in my Dropbox account from 0103 to 0951 (ie. seconds ago) so it’s still running. There are so far around 55++ files at the default 50Mb size. This would be a total of around 2.75Gb in space so far. I hope it gets a bit better because that would indicate about 200 days to backup the 800Gb.
Regardless, it’s working…
Kevin
What is the upload speed of your internet connection?
Hi,
My internet speed is Upload 12Mbs and download 22Mbs, but the rate limiter isn’t my upload speed it’s a combination of a not very vast and old i7 with a 16Gb RAM, some physical drives and a couple of VMs running AND the upload speed of Dropbox, which I have found to be somewhat variable. Nevertheless, it’s not as bad as I thought. Duplicati reports almost 63% complete. That took 32 hours. So worst case-is lets say it will take that again, ie. 32 more hours, to complete, a total of 64 hours (better than 200 days).
The differentials after the full backup will be much quicker. It will be interesting to try and do a restore after the full backup to verify it? Regardless, I’m happy with the way things are progressing so far. The upload speeds as you can see are hovering around 1Mbs (nowhere near the available upload speeds, actually an order of magnitude less, but as noted, I think slower for other reasons).
Thanks for the interest:)
Kevin
@Cirrus22 - That smaller progress meter showing ~63% is for the current file only - not the overall backup progress.
On a previous post you said you selected 800GB for backup, but Duplicati thinks it needs to back up 272TB! One guess: maybe you have a loop somewhere in your filesystem caused by a symlink. This should be handled correctly by Duplicati’s default options, but did you change the --symlink-policy option by chance?
Damn, I thought it was the overall progress. I now see it changes quite rapidly, clearly faster than the total backup…
I thought I selected 800Gb. Not that I recall, AFAIR I simply accepted the defaults unless I had to accept a path, ie. what was to be backed up. Clearly I’ve done something wrong there.
Do you recommend I abort the backup and review / reset the parameters rather than let the system try to work out what to do. Clearly this’ll become an issue if I change the backup and Duplicati then tries to do an incremental?
Kevin
There is nothing selected for backup by default, so you probably selected something. Apparently too much in this case!
Since you’ve only just started using Duplicati, if it were me I’d abort the backup job, delete the job including the local database, delete all back-end data, and start over.
Current versions of Duplicati don’t handle the “stop” option very well so I would normally never use that function, but since you’re going to nuke everything you don’t have to worry about that.
Good, thanks for that - it’s where I was heading. I will kill the job and delete the data etc and create a new job just to be sure. If Duplicati tells me it’s creating about 800Gb then I probably got it right.
Again, thanks for the advice.
Kevin
