Introducing "Duplicati, Inc."

Announcements
41

Restore from Azure BLOB hangs intermittently didn’t end that way. Developer expertise is stretched, having quite a backlog of issues and wants. Personally, I’m happy to see more of the original author (without disrespect to all the wonderful volunteers who followed and have made additional progress):

Music to my ears, as a volunteer mostly on the forum, who helps people with whatever they’re facing. Volunteers will continue to play an important role, I think, so please pitch in to help with what you can.
Maybe the new additions to the company will bring improved training materials, etc. that all can use…

I would agree, but the user volume and usage scenarios have also grown, so it’s still rather busy here. People will always ask questions, UX has gaps, etc., but its trustworthiness seems better, on average.

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42

I love Duplicati & Duplicati Inc :heart_eyes:

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43

There are other companies that are are open source and provide both community edition and commercial aspect of the software. Truenas comes to mind. And some created a bit of a frictions - pfsense comes to mind (not sure if they resolved them or not). Others (like Red Hat) hurt the community.

Wishing you all the best and keep up with the open source community. I am very thankful for the project. Even a home user can easily need to store 1-2 TB these days. For the home users - Duplicati has been extremely valuable resource. Hope it will always be available even for the ones who don’t have the means to pay. At the same time - be successful and attract the funding that are needed.

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44

Exciting news. Good luck. Duplicati has been perfect for my needs for a long time. Glad that not only is it not dying, but it’s going to grow. For better or worse i don’t donate too often, but Duplicati has been one of the very few things I have donated to. Glad to have supported.

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45

Most interesting. Let’s hope the community version gets the few fixes, it’s been waiting for long. Some things are really small things, but still lacking. Even the catastrophic things like data corruption hopefully get finally fixed. Even if that’s technically very small thing to fix, as discussed in other threads. - It has been painful journey for some parts.

Made me smile, as “developers” being more than one. Even 1/4 developer would have made all the difference, by just fixing the worst parts which made everyone sweat and seriously betrayed the users whom didn’t know and realize these unacceptable risks.

But hopefully that’s soon resolved and we can see the bright future!

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46

Great news! Website or do we still get announcements here?
Of all the backup software I evaluated, Duplicati has been the best. With a dedicated team, it will no doubt be a commercial success.

47

Good luck with your venture. I liked Duplicati (have moved away recently)

I was planning some sort of short goodbye message, so I was triggered to write it now.

I — and thanks to me my family — have been using Duplicati for some years now. It was flakey when we started, later we had little trouble, it was stable. They were backing up to a MinIO server hosted by me. I developed a macOS launchd setup for Duplicati. While the family was using Duplicati, I backed up the server (not the Duplicati data) with CrashPlan, which I had been using for a very long time. But CrashPlan had gotten much worse over time. It is a resource hog java monster and while its deduplication is good, it is slow and eats CPU and memory. But what it also did was simply stop allowing me to backup system files and configuration, only user level files. It was no longer a good option for decent backups. A migration that lost me a lot of files (via CrashPlan and how it behaved) also had hurt.

MinIO has made a backwards-incompatible change 1.5 years ago, which means I had to move away from my current MinIO setup (which would not have been an easy migration) and stuck as I was I was not getting updates. Updating Duplicati itself also wasn’t comfortable most of the time. Stopping the launchd-started service never was smooth for some reason. And its Windows-heritage always made it somewhat hard for me to understand (i.e. I still do not know what a ‘tray’ is) and my backup stuff should be running in the background (I only use the GUI when changing a setup or when restoring).

A few months back, I decided that all of this meant I should look at the whole backup setup again. A before I had looked at restic which was interesting (after all, if CERN uses it for its backups, it does give you a feeling of trust).

Since a few months I have fully migrated myself and all the other family members to restic (0.16.3). CrashPlan is gone from the server. Duplicati is gone. MinIO is gone. Mono is gone. Restic is not for everyone, as it is command-line only, but for the rest I am rather happy. It is blazingly fast, for one. I have (of course…) created a script that works both on macOS (MacPorts restic) — including setting up launch schedules — and on a Linux machine (now my second server next to a macOS one — don’t ask) using a container restic. I have local backups (both disk and REST) and backups to B2. Everything has been running without a hitch for a few months now.

So, as things stand now I am happy with my more native-unix type of solution. But there will be many more people who will be uncomfortable using a CLI-solution and who need something like Duplicati.

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48

Hi Kenneth,
when 100% open source projects go commercial there are always two considerations:

  • the project might change it’s goals an move away from true open source standards and benefits
  • the project will get a more serious foundation for it’s existence in the future and not depend on individuals who have a limited lifetime
    So I’ll accept your message with a tear in one eye and a laugh in the other, while being confident that a REALLY GOOD tool will be available for many more years.
    Michael
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49

Backrest is a new web ui for restic. It looks promising.

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50

Very good way to view and respond to a free program.

51

Congrats !
I wish you all the best
A.

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52

Congratulations on Duplicati, Inc. Having started my own software company years ago, I know you’ll find it hard but exhilarating work.

I’m a newcomer to Duplicati who’s looking for an alternative for Time Machine on Win10. I just submitted a question to the Forum. Maybe I missed it, but it would be good for the website to address these seemingly common desires.

Finally, I don’t need much - just the features listed there. More importantly, I don’t want much else: further feature and options just increase the cognitive load for people who are moving from “no-backup” mode to (finally) having one. Thanks, and again, congratulations!

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53

Hi @kenkendk,

EDIT: My bad, I looked at the site on my phone and didn’t really notice that I should just follow the Getting Started page once logged in. Please ignore any steps asked below, but please elaborate on the differences if any for now. Currently, it looks like it basically mirrors “duplicati-monitoring.com”.

Just wanted to find out, how would it work when we want to sign up for Duplicati Inc. Free or Paid version? I was curious as to what would be the difference currently, as things are now, between the Open Source and the Paid Version, based on download, install and setup:

Download: Would we just stick with the open-source releases binaries, or are there a “special” closed source version you have to download? I can see the download link on the site, but I can’t see any version or special name that indicate that it is the/a closed source copy of some sort?

Install: Can I upgrade or “migrate” an open-source copy to the “closed source” copy by simply installing over the exiting installation? (Hopefully just running the installation and it figures it out)? Or should we install it alongside and migrate over the backups one by one manually?

Setup: If it is the case that it is the exact same code (binary) as the open source currently with no difference. So, the only difference may be that we only need to “connect” the open-source system to the “paid” online site monitoring system (like we currently do with “duplicati-monitoring.com”)?

I’m running it on Windows Server 2016. Effectively I wanted to start understanding how the closed source version and a sign-up to Duplicati Inc experience would be different that the open-source DIY experience I’m very used to.

I couldn’t find any instructions on the site for the closed source version that would show how to get started with it, otherwise I could have just read that and see where the process is different.

Also, I fully understand that technically it is the same code base currently, but I saw that you have put something up already and I wanted to start with it, but are not looking for any wow factors. Also, I’m considering paying for the service if it adds value that I can benefit from, from a business perspective (And my own feeling of wanting to support the effort).

Thanks,
Bernard

54

The Duplicati Portal has a long list of features, some are announced and others will be. We decided to start with the feature that was most requested by the community and current users, which is clearly monitoring. We are currently implementing more dashboard features and will soon add some of the paid-only features.

I am not a user of duplicati-monitoring so I cannot make a comparison for you.

The company is founded around an open-core business model, so having a thriving open-source community is a must. There is no closed-sourced client and everything works with the open-source client.

The communication is a bit hard because the Duplicati domain serves both open-source content (the download page for instance) and things from the company (the portal subscriptions for instance).

There is no closed-source version so it would be speculative to talk about how it would potentially work.

Maybe this was the part you figured out, but yes, if you are using another monitoring solution today, you can switch over quite easily, nothing else changes. I have added a feature that allows having multiple monitoring solutions set up as that was requested. Only the “debug” binaries have this feature for now, but if you use it, you can use the two monitoring systems in parallel.

I can get behind that. Anything you pay for should add value in some form. We intend to make sure that the Duplicati Portal is worth paying for. If there is a feature missing in the portal that you think would make it worthwhile for you to become a customer, please get in touch.

Please don’t use Github issues for request to the portal

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55

Best of luck “going commercial”. You could have a look at ardour.org to see a FOSS project succesfully earning a living.

While duplicati has always been in beta state while I was (still am!) using it, I never encountered really broken stuff, and it was only yesterday that I succesfully recovered a 60 GB+ backup after a system switch. Thanks!

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56

Congratulations!

Your hard work with Duplicati will surely pay off. Best of luck in all your future endeavors. Keep up the fantastic work!

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