Hey, I want to make uncompressed backups onto Google Drive. I disabled encryption but the files on Drive still show up as 3 or 4 files which I am forced to uncompress using Duplicati. Is there any way to do a full backup every time? I understand its less secure and uses more storage and all that but I would much prefer just regular folders for my uses. Even zipped folders is fine.
Mike
Hi Mike,
What you’re seeing is a result of the block based storage engine that Duplicati uses.
Each file backed up is split into blocks and stored in volumes of a fixed size. On the backend this is what you’re seeing as encrypted zip files.
There’s a good explanation of the entire process here: Block-based storage engine • Duplicati
This process is what makes Duplicati able to natively deduplicate the data without much cost.
It is not possible to back up files without doing this process, so if you must have the files in plain zip files you will have to use a different backup tool.
If your primary concern is not being able to restore your files, it may help knowing that there are options to download all the files and restore them using a fairly simple python script from the Duplicati repository.
Both the script and the Duplicati code are freely available, so it will never be the case that these backup files are impossible to restore from just because the Duplicati software stopped working.
I get that this is a difficult concept, but it’s important to remember that every completed duplicati backup is a “full backup”, even though it doesn’t need to transfer over 100% of the unchanged data.
It really sounds as if you don’t want a backup tool, but instead a sync tool (such as rClone perhaps).