Internet backup fails when connection drops

I have been trying backups to Backblaze B2, having finally got local ones to work. This inevitably takes a lot longer to get the initial backup uploaded - many days. In this time my internet connection has briefly dropped twice (I’m not sure whether this is my provider, or that I’m running over a VPN which occasionally swaps servers). This causes Duplicati to stop, and put up a message that api.backlaze.com cannot be resolved. Presumably the same would be true for any remote service.

While it’s useful to know, completely terminating the backup in these circumstances seems extreme, given it is a temporary problem that everyone on the internet suffers from time to time. I think it should say there’s been a problem, but keep trying every few seconds.

As it stands, it has lost many hours of useful overnight backup time because it require manual dismissal of the error message. Having done this, it seems to have resumed without me pressing the Run Now button (from the beginning, in that it is scanning the whole file system again, though I imagine when it gets to look what is already on Backblaze it will not backup those files all over again, we’ll see, but it hasn’t got that far yet). It’s not set to be a regular backup (yet), so I was a bit surprised it just restarted when I dismissed the error message.

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Duplicati does 5 retries and waits 10 seconds between each attempt. I am guessing that it takes a bit longer for the DNS to get back up.

You can set the advanced options if you want to wait more:

--retry-delay=1m 
--number-of-retries=10

This will give 1 minute delay and 10 retries.

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Just as a reassurance, the “remaining size” indicator is indeed misleading, as it includes stuff that has already been backed up and won’t need to be repeated - it’s just that (in that particular run) Duplicati hasn’t gotten that far yet in its scan-through.

That’s useful to know, thanks. The outage that prompted this was 45 minutes, so I’m thinking waiting an hour or two or more - it’s not like it’s got anything else to do :-).