Is Duplicati kind of abandoned?

Fantastic.

Will try our and will add it to our FOSS donation plan this year in addition to Duplicati.

My company built our SaaS apps on FOSS so we donate to 1-3 projects every year to give back, but obviously a reoccuring income is neccessary if one should be able to live of it.

I have unfortunately not written a single line of .NET code in my life, and would be useless in that regard. Can’t say I have an abudance of cash either (But will happily use company money :wink: )

But what Duplicati is lacking for me as a sysadmin / DevOps Engineer is a centralized server so I don’t havbe to go to our 12 web portals every morning to double check that backups have ran properly.

If I were to monetize Duplicati I would start by offering that behind a pay wall - and later perhaps offer a free version that’s good enough for small scale, and a “pro” version for better needs with included support.

I DO HOWEVER have compute hardware and datacenter space in abudance (Once again that company cash) - perhaps I can take a load off @kenkendk’s back / costs by hosting that for free?

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Donations has information. Anything helps, but it’s not clear it’s enough for anyone to quit a day job. Open source (especially GPL) makes it tough to monetize. Some value-add might offer a path, BUT

Duplicati has an ecosystem of free or donation based third party monitoring tools that fill some spots.
I don’t want to get in deep in that, but the point is that monetization faces challenges of free software.

Anyway, something to think about to see if money is possible. For now, Duplicati relies on volunteers.

Thanks for the hosting offer. I don’t know what kenkendk actually sees here, but I’ll keep that in mind. Some of the low-cost hosting now used is a bit flaky. If we find test people, they would need gear too.

The user community eventually hits them but can’t provide good debug info. Formal beating on lots of systems equipped with good logging, etc. would be one way to help track elusive intermittent issues…

Once again, volunteers are needed. We need to recruit a broad base of community support somehow. There are lots of different components to making a software product. There’s a lot more than coding…

The solution I came up with for this is to have Duplicati report to my Zabbix monitoring server every time a job runs. In addition to logging both successful and failed jobs, it will alert me if too much time goes by in between completed backups. This is useful in cases where Duplicati ends up “stuck”, and neither succeeds nor fails at the job.

I have found in my experience as a sysadmin, that “Nothing happened” can be even more dangerous than an outright failure, as it tends to not trip any alarms.

You mind sharing how you did it? We use PRTG and I was thinking of doing the same thing, but I’d rather not have to reinvent the wheel if you’ve already came up with a good solution.

@guemi

Duplicati can report the success / failure of a job through http. You could try to use a PRTG http push and set the scanning interval to fit the backup plan.

The search box at the top of the screen shows 5 PRTG topics. Maybe open another, if that’s needed.

I’m not sure I would call my solution good. It works, but was cumbersome to set up.

I wrote a batch file that is called by Duplicati’s run-script-after option when a job runs. This batch file gathers some information from the environment variables that Duplicati sets when it runs and submits them to Zabbix by the zabbix_sender application. I then wrote a Zabbix template that accepts the inputs and populates the various monitors in Zabbix.

If the run-script-result-output-format setting is set to JSON, it will also submit additional data that I can use to track other things, such as the size of the source and backups, size of uploads and downloads, and various other helpful pieces of data.

I wish I could have Duplicati submit the data directly to Zabbix via http, bypassing the need for a batch file and run-script-after setting, but Zabbix doesn’t support accepting inputs that way.

I’m not sure how this would translate to PRTG, but I’m sure a similar solution could be put together.

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