Duplicati Update

Hello

Some advice:

  • first and foremost: a good test is ONLY a reproducible test. It’s absolutely essential to document the steps for get to the initial situation (known as good) and the steps to produce a failure. So you should be able to get back to the initial state of data before the test begins. The main reason is that you can’t be sure of fixing a problem unless you actually demonstrates that you fix it. Another very powerful reason is that Duplicati, as a backup software for the masses, should work for people with consumer grade hardware. That means hardware without ECC Ram. Nowadays consumer grade hardware has lot of Ram and sometimes it suffers random failure (mostly cosmic rays and I am absolutely not joking). So an isolated crash or failure on such hardware means absolutely nothing and you would just wasting the time of everyone reading your reports. If you can reproduce it every time (at least 2 times), it begins to be interesting.

  • stays to the basics. A backup software has 2 main points: backup and restore. The most important step is restore, although it is hardly possible without the backup step. So the main test objective is testing restoring data. Duplicati has tons of commands that are only useful if you have a good database. If you are starting from backup data and a new computer and you can’t restore data, these commands are useless.
    I’d modestly point to my own post about the best way to test restoring data:
    Duplicati error while restoring - #9 by gpatel-fr
    because using the command line is the best way to ensure reproducibility, without having to do screenshots, describe complicated click sequences…
    So if you have a way to get from good data to a restore failure (uncomplete while it should be correct, unsuccessful even), you could help the project. If you have such a case, post it here and see if someone that can read code can help figure the problem out. If you are ready to share the data or if it’s not doable provide a way to someone more experienced to access your test computer, the better.