External USB HDD - setting for alternate-target-paths + alternate-destination-marker have no effect

Support
1

On one of my Windows 10 machines I was using Duplicati in version “2.0.7.1 (2.0.7.1_beta_2023-05-25)”. So far I had no problems.
Today I updated to version “2.1.0.2_beta_2024-11-29” (clean install, but with all settings from version 2.0.7.1).
Since then the settings for alternate-target-paths + alternate-destination-marker have no effect.

For what ever reason the external harddrive got a new drive letter (switched from F: to G:). And to avoid problems in such a case, I use for all backups the above mentionend parameters.
Here the values for the parameters and the error messages I got:

--alternate-destination-marker=opokjejg.duplicati
--alternate-target-paths=*:\Duplicati\Dokumente_ZBOX

2025-01-09 11:55:07 +01 - [Error-Duplicati.Library.Main.Controller-FailedOperation]: Die Operation Backup ist mit folgenden Fehler fehlgeschlagen: Die Markierungsdatei "opokjejg.duplicati" wurde an keiner der untersuchten Orte gefunden: F:\Duplicati\Dokumente_ZBOX\, *:\Duplicati\Dokumente_ZBOX
UserInformationException: Die Markierungsdatei "opokjejg.duplicati" wurde an keiner der untersuchten Orte gefunden: F:\Duplicati\Dokumente_ZBOX\, *:\Duplicati\Dokumente_ZBOX

 "Errors": [
    "2025-01-09 11:55:07 +01 - [Error-Duplicati.Library.Main.Controller-FailedOperation]: Die Operation Backup ist mit folgenden Fehler fehlgeschlagen: Die Markierungsdatei \"opokjejg.duplicati\" wurde an keiner der untersuchten Orte gefunden: F:\\Duplicati\\Dokumente_ZBOX\\, *:\\Duplicati\\Dokumente_ZBOX\r\nUserInformationException: Die Markierungsdatei \"opokjejg.duplicati\" wurde an keiner der untersuchten Orte gefunden: F:\\Duplicati\\Dokumente_ZBOX\\, *:\\Duplicati\\Dokumente_ZBOX"
  ],

I made sure that the marker file exists and as already mentioned with the previous version of Duplicati it all worked fine.
I also looked at older backups, where the drive letter in the backup configuration was also different than the actual drive letter. These backups worked with version 2.0.7.1 without problems.

Can it be that there is some regression bug from version 2.0.7.1 to 2.1.0.2?

2

Yes! The problem is the * is not correctly expanded because a simple if statement was accidentally inverted. It has been fixed in a canary build v2.1.0.101 and will be part of the next beta release.

3

Thanks for the quick response. I’ll look forward to the next beta.

For the time being, I changed the drive letter manually to the most used letter in the backup jobs and will amend the other backup jobs to point to the changed drive letter.