Hi Duplicati team,
Please have a look at the profile level logs:
Are those ??? consistent/expected? Or is the backup process stalled.
2.2TB, 7 days and 25% progress.
Yes, the question marks are expected - they are placeholders for actual values that are determined at run time.
Depending on your system / bandwidth specs and number of files involved I could see it taking quite a while for the initial backup.
If you’re worried about stalls, try checking the “Show log” button on the main menu About page then select the “Live” button with the “Profiling” or “Verbose” option selected from the selector.
Similarly, you could use the “System info” button from the main menu About page then scroll down to the the “Server state properties” section which will update with the most recent step being processed (I believe in the “lastPgEvent” line).
Thanks. Those logs you mention are the ones Ive got. I was able to see that the backup was going as the file count went down after a while. So what you are saying is that the ? Values indicate a stall? The progress still extremely slow.
loosing hope in this software…so inconsistent
Not at all. The “?” placeholder is how the sqlite calls are written (it’s like that in the code). When the SQL is actually executed C# replaces the “?” with the actual values necessary for that specific database call.
For example, here are 2 lines of actual code that could produce the log message you saw:
m_insertblockCommand.CommandText = @"INSERT INTO ""Block"" (""Hash"", ""VolumeID"", ""Size"") VALUES (?, ?, ?); SELECT last_insert_rowid();";
m_insertblockCommand.AddParameters(3);
The 2nd line adds the 3 parameters that eventually replace the 3 “?” in the first line. When the code executes, the value that replaces the first “?” gets put into the “Hash” field, the second “?” value goes into the “VolumeID” field, and the third “?” value goes into the “Size” field.
Sorry to hear that. There are lots of installations that run without issues, but there are even more variations in computers, internet connections, destinations, etc. so it’s possible we just haven’t yet gotten the code in place that works well for your situation. 
The solution approach I am taking is to backup small and run successful backups. And little by little adding new files. However the time taken each time increases as if new. For now 300GB out of the initial 2.2TB are succrssfully backup. Another reason for the restart is the power issues of handling one thunderbolt drive and two usb drives I am also facing. I managed to feed the thunderbolt out of external power to remediate but now the system halted between backup jobs. So duplicati might not be the reason. Surely I will find a job that will break the backup I am separating/grouping jobs to avoid impacting the successful runs. I will continue and report back. So far the two issues reported by the logs are:
- Permission (understandable if I try to backup /Library with a standard user.
- Metadata not backed up. In external sources.
Will report back with further data.