I hear the concerns about the instability. At this point, they are valid.
However, I am sticking with Duplicati for the time being for the following reasons. These are just my opinions (subject to change):
- Acronis is heavy on resources
- Paragon is hard for (non-tech) users to understand (so if I’m going to be helping them / setting it up anyway…)
- Carbonite slowed down 1 system I investigated, and does not include large files nor video files by default
- BackBlaze Backup doesnt keep enough versions
- Duplicati is open source
- and standards based, meaning, you could (with difficulty) extract your backups from the
.dblockfiles by hand, without Duplicati, if you had to. Ie, no lock-in.
- and standards based, meaning, you could (with difficulty) extract your backups from the
- Duplicati is free
- (Perhaps since Duplicati is free) it is focused on giving the user maximum choice
- Duplicati via hashing ensures integrity of backup files–especially important with online backups
- This hashing complicates Duplicati and is responsible for a lot of the bugs.
- File-sync programs that compare only dates and file sizes and store files as plain files in the backup are not as complicated, have fewer bugs, and the backup files are directly viewable/usable/recoverable. Those are significant advantages. However, if there’s corruption, you’re out of luck. I can’t depend on that for long-term, widespread usage.
- Duplicati is compatible with an enormous range of platforms. It’s quite remarkable.
- Duplicati had 204 votes on
alternatives.to- highest of the free options (that’s what brought me here in the first place) - Duplicati has a very active forum and vigorous user community for help and work arounds
- Duplicati is in active development with a capable team
- The lead developer @kenkendk posts on the forum regularly.
Duplicati looks to me to be on track to be an excellent software program, and I’m excited to be in on the ground floor.