I’ve been a very happy user of Duplicati for years and have a regular payment setup to support the development of the product.
However, I had to rebuild my main workstation a few days ago and have installed Duplicati again. I’m on Pop OS but for all intents and purposes it’s just Ubuntu under the hood.
I started and enabled the “duplicati” service and expected to browse to port 8300 on localhost, but that just returned an error saying the site can’t be found. I then started the “app” from the list on my workstation and that worked, but only port 8200. I ignored that at the time and setup all my jobs. Everything was OK but I had to start the app every time I logged in. No big deal but I just rebooted now and all my jobs are gone. The backup data is still there but I’ve never managed to “import” an old backup set into Duplicati properly.
The question is this - how should Duplicati be setup on Linux so that it starts automatically in the background and kicks off scheduled tasks without me having to run the Duplicati “app”? I thought this was what port 8300 was for. Anyway, that’s how I had it before and everything was fine, but I can’t seem to get it going that way now.
I’ve followed the docs and configured the daemon options for port 8300 etc, but still all my jobs are gone unless I try the “app” version (which is on port 8200 still, for some reason).
8200 is the port used by the first instance launched, 8300 by the second instance, and so on. If you were seeing 8300 on your old system, you had two instances running (or you hard-coded the listening port to 8300).
Normally the systemd service should launch first and listen on port 8200. I would avoid launching a second instance, it just causes confusion for most people. (But multi-instance is useful in some situations.) Each instance has its own independent configuration for backups and settings.
Close the “app” / trayicon instance of Duplicati and confirm that the systemd service is running. I would do all your configuration there. The systemd service can run backups even if you aren’t logged in, and by default has root level access to back up all files (assuming you used the official Duplicati install package).
Duplicati.GUI.TrayIcon.exe talks about the available-port search, which I “think” server version doesn’t do.
Another thing that gets mixups is that Duplicati job configs are in ~/.config/Duplicati/Duplicati-server.sqlite, and your service Duplicati is probably root, while the app version is probably you. Whichever one is larger is likely the one that you configured. You can run the strings command over it to look for expected paths…
Another clue would be randomly named .sqlite files in a folder. These are job DBs, and can be moved. Duplicati-server.sqlite is harder to move to another account because it has paths to the job DBs inside it.