Duplicati sqlite database doesn't seem to change after running backups (SOLVED)

[city_zen]

@Wim_Jansen

Probably your actual db is not where you think it is. Go the the database section of your job and check the path. It will probably be a different one.

Hi @Wim_Jansen
Yes, that’s what I thought at first. There had to be another database somewhere. But I ran a search looking for sqlite files that had been modified in the last few days and couldn’t find another one

So I decided to repair or, if necessary, rebuild the database, and that’s when I found the solution. When trying to rebuild the database, Duplicati complained about not having access to the path (c:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Duplicati) Which is very strange, since it should be running as SYSTEM, and I checked that both SYSTEM and the user I was logged in as both had read and write permissions to that path

The solution ended up being more complex than what I thought. I went back to reading the tutorial for migrating Duplicati to a service:

Migrating from User to Service install on Windows

Thanks to @martijnsmith for giving me the boost needed to “how-to” this! If you want to run Duplicati as a Windows service instead of under a specific user account OR maybe you find that you keep getting errors such as the following, it could be that you’re running Duplicati under a user install for a non-administrator user. System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path '<path>' is denied. Firstly, congratulations on not doing everyday work as an administrator! …

In that topic, the database location is discussed and there seems to be several alternatives about its location. In the last post of the thread, Ken makes this suggestion:

@kenkendk

You can set the environment variable DUPLICATI_HOME=C:\ProgramData\Duplicati and it will stop using %LOCALAPPDATA%Duplicati.

So I did exactly that, created the environmental variable for Duplicati and moved both sqlite files (Duplicati-server.sqlite and the job-specific sqlite file) to that folder so that Duplicati could find them. After that, I expected Duplicati to use that path for all its data, but it wasn’t that simple.
The settings (Duplicati-server.sqlite) were imported correctly, but the job database was not. So I decided to recreate it.
To my surprise, Duplicati started to recreate the database in C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Duplicati

So I ended up with one sqlite file in C:\ProgramData\Duplicati and another one in C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Duplicati

I don’t know if this is the expected behaviour, or maybe if I made a mistake in all this process.
It’s not ideal, but at least it works now. The database size and timestamp changes when backups are run. So I’m going to leave it like that

Hopefully this explanation helps someone else in case they run into the same problem

I’ll update the topic title as SOLVED now