How to backup the backup?

[Sami_Lehtinen]

@drwtsn32

Interesting idea, but it would be a big design change. I think one of Duplicati’s strengths (and in some situations a weakness) is that the back end where data is stored is just dumb storage. There is no remote engine at all.

I didn’t mean having a remote engine. I’ve actually written about this in some post earlier.

Is a server/client setup possible with Duplicati?

This is a bit of an edge case for people with destinations they can control, however I agree it would be nice. There was a comment a while ago about possibly saving some of the local database content out to the destination. If that “remote database content” included flagged-for-deletion items then destination compacting becomes much more likely, HOWEVER - there’s still a lot of work involved with coordinating. For example, what if the destination is compacting when the source decides to ALSO…

Compact - Limited / Partial

I didn’t make any specific test set, I just observed operation. But actually when I encountered that other thread it made me think about that dblock size thread, it could have been related to it. Therefore it’s like ly that I had changed dblock size (quite a while before the auto compact triggered) and then I just observed the results of it, much later. Making me wonder, why all of the files of the backup set have been rewritten. As stated I’ve got three digit number of different backup sets, …

But from my old perspective of software product manager. Sure, these both options easily add lof of complexity and things that could go wrong. And therefore, it’s totally pointless to address this kind of “nice to have” features, before core features are rock solid.

One way of doing that would be “logging the changes”, either the client could send file which tells what to compact and how, or in case of “remote / local alternate compact” the log would contain information what has been compacted and how to update the local database accordingly. - But that’s just adding more complexity and making things more brittle for a small optimization / security improvement.

@drwtsn32

I prefer Duplicati the way it is now - client software + dumb remote storage. I’m not having the issues you describe in that other thread, so maybe that is why I’m more confident in its current design.

Have you tried restoring your database from the storage without local database? If you haven’t done that, you might now know that you’ve got a bomb waiting for you. - But enough about that. It’ll get fixed, when it’s get fixed. And as I’ve said, it’s probably from technical perspective small issue, which could and should get fixed in several stages of the processing.

But if we talk about this thread, snapshotting the backups and backing up the backups (with duplicati or alternate versioning software) both work, without creating the complexity of providing write only access.

Just wanted to warn people about the fact, that making backups of the backups, still might leave you with non-restorabe backup situation.