I’d like to move from crashplan to duplicati, but I have 2 years of file history on Crashplan. Can I move them?
Also, does duplicati backup like… everything?
I’m asking because I’ve been using a backup of, for example, windows registry. I needed to get some old registry entries and it helped me. Does duplicati do that? With shadowcopy?
Duplicati2 is far from ready (and 1.3.4 is not supported anymore). Duplicati2 beta is far behind latest development versions, and development is dealing with lots of problems yet to be solved. You cannot trust Duplicati2 for production use yet. But you could start using it little by little besides your other backup system so when it gets ready, you already have accumulated a few year’s worth of stuff.
Duplicati2 does have support for snapshots, if that is what you mean by shadow copy.
Shadow copy is a way of creating a copy of a file that’s locked in use.
Yes, that is exactly what Duplicati achieves by using the snapshot method that the underlying platform provides (there are differences between Windows and Linux; Macs I am no familiar with).
I know of no way you could do this, short of restoring every version and backing it up again - which seems ridiculous. Main problems are that we don’t have access to the back end data, and even if we did the format of that data is probably not documented.
It would have been cool though - I used CrashPlan for over 5 years in the past, lots of versions basically lost because I refuse to pay for that declining product.
When I mentioned support for snapshots, I forgot to add that it is not on by default. You have to enable the support, and to do that, you have to be running Duplicati with administrator’s privileges.
Why that would be a problem? It’s something you can automate, and if data is important enough that’s a small cost. Also if the crashplan restore process runs efficiently, it can simply patch from version to version just modifying required files on every iteration.
That’s exactly how I’ve converted lot of stuff between some very old version management systems. It’s still lot easier than writing totally custom software to support the legacy formats.
As example a script which will convert all Duplicati backup versions to git revisions, or all git revisions to Duplicati versions, is quite trivial. Especially if you don’t need to maintain all metadata. Or using something simple like the duplicati version timestamp as commit message.
I guess you don’t really know how much that kind of stuff is done in corporations with legacy stuff. If it’s not done, in the worst case you’ll end up with data / formats, which are no more possible to process without extensive reverse engineering and guess how expensive that is.
You can? I didn’t think CrashPlan had that kind of automation ability. But if you could automate, that solves one of the challenges.
The other (bigger?) challenge is the speed of restores. Large restores seem to be throttled (yet another problem with CrashPlan). If the plan is to do a full restore of each version followed by a backup of that version with Duplicati, I could see it taking an inordinate amount of time.
I wasn’t speaking in generalities of doing conversions, but specifically about CrashPlan. It is a closed system - format undocumented - we don’t have access to back end data - we are at the mercy of their throttling, etc, etc.
If someone does succeed in finding a way to convert all versions of CP backups, by all means please share it with the group!
How about if @Acrivec asks CrashPlan, possibly not going heavy on the wish to leave them, but asking about doing restore through a script? A small amount of searching found only an API, limited by licensing.
https://www.crashplan.com/apidocviewer/#PushRestoreJob
BUT
so I’m wondering if API is only applicable to Code42 for Enterprise. So what do smaller customers have?
Anyone want to specifically ask Code42 more on this? If they can do the restore, Duplicati can back it up, however the dates on the backups will reflect the actual backup time. File times will be as were restored.
Proof point: I bailed from CrashPlan after 10 years last month. Just before that, I did a 3GB restore that CrashPlan had saved in their Cloud (backed up from a different computer at my son’s house out of state) and it took 4 days. Was the final straw. We simply abandoned the entire CrashPlan data set as all of our data is additive, we didn’t have historical data that hadn’t been brought forward. Lucky I guess. If you do that math a TB could take 3+ years and cost over $400 in monthly fees for just a single client. I don’t envy your situation…
Have heard some reputable backup services will restore to USB drive and ship it to you for a fee. Not sure Code42 fits that anymore, either as reputable or capable.
Well… I’ve stayed with CrashPlan for the unlimited versions (so I have a version for each month forever), but if the restore speeds have dropped this badly… I’ll have to reconsider it.
Although I don’t see anyone offering the things I want.
Unlimited space (or 2TB for good price), unlimited versions, unlimited time, encrypted.
Duplicati seems to be unfinished for that…
I think the “unlimited space” is what killed CrashPlan. Not a sustainable business model.
Duplicati offers all the features listed but of course it doesn’t handle storage. That’s the beauty of it - you can use whatever storage you want.
How much data do you have to back up? Wasabi and B2 are about $0.005/GB/mo, so about $5/mo per TB.
I’ve been replied that it’s not yet reliable enough.
I guess it depends on your perspective. It has been very reliable for me - I’ve been using it 2 years now. There are for sure some issues that still need to be resolved though.
I concur, I use it “live” on 6 different systems, although being a server admin I can handle the “issues” which would not be great for ordinary users, so I see that point of view.
Still, it’s better than CrashPlan 
