Moving from Canary to Beta?

Hi,

Seeing the Changelog on the latest Canary has made me wonder whether I’d be safer running the Beta.

What would I need to do to switch at this point?

I’m currently running Duplicati - 2.0.3.5_canary_2018-04-13.

Thanks

Andy

You have a few different choices as far as I know - either install the latest Beta version outright, or instead just go 1 step up instead of 2 and use the Experimental (which will still contain newer features but should be more stable in general). And last, you could just skip this canary version.

You can also go to “Settings” and choose the channel you want to use. From then on, Duplicati will only inform you about releases in that channel.

To uninstall an update, quit Duplicati, then delete the version in the “Updates” folder (see “system info” for the path), and restart Duplicati.

Or, as @drakar2007 suggests, simply install the base version you want.

1 Like

latest version works awful. I moved back to 2.0.3.3_beta_2018-04-02

I assume you meant the canary build. Anything in particular that did not work well?

1 Like

Yeah, can you specify what you find to be awful? I haven’t tried it yet but will probably install soon unless i hear good reasons not to.

First backup to existing remote DB after repairing local DB performing too long > 30 mins, so I just canceled it.
I did rollback to beta version and same operation took 2 mins.

Hi,
I’ve just tried to move from Canary to Beta on my Mac, without success :frowning:
Duplicati refused to launch. Using terminal command, it displayed “The database has version 5 but the largest supported version is 4.”
Is it possible to downgrade database version, without losing my configuration ?
I have to add that it’s quite a long time I run Canary releases, so all the files on my ~/.config/Duplicati/ folder are tied to Canary versions.

That indicates that the update failed and that you are now running an older version. It is slightly complicated to downgrade the database, but essentially, you need to revert this:

And then set the version (in the settings table) to “4”.

1 Like

Is this the backup process that went from 2min to 30min ?

What causes the database version change - is it a particular Duplicati update or something related to the running environment?

If it’s the Duplicati update itself, may I suggest including that information in the release notes so it’s easier for people to know if a particular update will be harder to roll back if necessary.

1 Like

@JonMikelV : The GitHub link says that they have

Implemented a new logging system that is more transparent and allows a more granular way of picking log messages.
Added ID’s to each log message and each exception to allow later introduction of a Knowledgebase service that explains each error in more detail.

So it’s a good evolution.

@kenkendk : thank you for the indication. I’m now searching how to pass the 3 following commands on my Mac. I read here that Duplicati uses AlphaVSS, but I don’t know how to access to AlphaVSS CLI. Do you know how ?
ALTER TABLE "Notification" DROP COLUMN "LogEntryID"; ALTER TABLE "Notification" DROP COLUMN "MessageID"; ALTER TABLE "Notification" DROP COLUMN "MessageLogTag";

You can edit the databases on Mac using http://sqlitebrowser.org/.

1 Like

Thanks! I’ve successfully downgraded!
What I did :

  1. download http://sqlitebrowser.org/ (following @Pectojin advice)
  2. launch this software and open “Duplicati-server.sqlite” file. It’s a SQLlite database, so it doesn’t support “DROP” command, but you can follow these indication to remove “LogEntryID”, “MessageID” and “MessageLogTag” fields : https://stackoverflow.com/a/48097199/6620863
  3. with the same software, modify the version value that you will find in “Version” table (“4” instead of “5”)
  4. save the database modifications
  5. install and launch Duplicati Beta
3 Likes

Thanks for this. I wanted to run the beta stream but had moved one canary too far forward and had a v5 database. Ended up copying my database to another Linux system where I could run sqlitebrowser; seemed to work.

I wanted to revert back too. But I can’t open the Duplicati-server.sqlite database with any SQLite browser, it asks for a passphrase to open.

I assume you’re on Windows? According to this, the database is scrambled with a “default” password on Windows for a minor security gain. You might want to either browse the source code for that password (this looks like a good starting point), or contact the dev team for a way around this.

Run Duplicati.Server.exe with the argument --unencrypted-database to decrypt the database file. Running duplicati without that argument will encrypt the database again if necessary.

1 Like

It happens only when someone actively codes for it. It can be to optimize the database for some query, or to store extra data for new features. I try to keep the database updates to a minimum to allow users to downgrade more freely.

Yes, I will try to remember that.

The next (expected) database change is the optimization for storing paths in a more space efficient way. I have developed and tested the changes, but I wanted a slighty more robust canary before slipping in another database upgrade.

Good plan - it does feel like there are some general functionality issues that have cropped up and should be dealt with before moving forward on performance improvements.