New User with Duplicati - feedback

1

I’ve left it a bit late but I’m looking to replace Crashplan and have tried Duplicati first. Here are some reasons why I’m considering trying others - although I do hope that most of this is user error.

  1. With smart retention turned on, you won’t be keeping deleted files or versions intra day. You will only have the latest backup for that day. My solution is to turn it off and keep all versions up to a year (for example).
  2. No apparent support for B2 Application Keys (have to use the master key). This is unfortunate but not a total deal breaker (EDIT: works by using associated KeyID as AccountID)
  3. B2 support appears “chatty” - backing up uses B2 download bandwidth and transaction capacity. This may not be an issue as long as it doesn’t increase with backup size/versions/number of files, but based on my understanding of how Duplicati works I don’t quite understand why backups need to be downloaded.
  4. When restoring a file, the interface forces you to pick a date/version first, and then drill down to the file required - so effectively each file has as many versions as there are backups (even if they were unchanged between them). A possibly more useful approach would be to show all the files available in the latest version, and then the available different versions as a tree under each - a la Crashplan. Deleted items are shown/hidden with a checkbox. This effectively presents itself as an audit/change log per file, which is useful for the times when you don’t know when a file changed or what version you actually want.
2
  1. Yeah this is one feature I kind of miss from CrashPlan - separate retention options for deleted files specifically. Your workaround is one solution. I did the same although only for 1 week. After that I keep daily backups for 1 month, weekly backups for 2 years, and then only monthly backups or something similar.
  2. Oh wow, I didn’t realize B2 supported keys for limited access to specific buckets, etc. I would love for Duplicati to also support this. When was this feature added to B2?
  3. This is probably due to Duplicati’s backup integrity checking. After every backup it will download some of the backup data and make sure it is valid. You can disable it if you want, check the --backup-test-samples option. I don’t seem to have much of an issue with B2 and this download test. My B2 bill is currently about $10/mo and the download charge last month was $0.85. (Edit to add - it may be worse if your block size is set to some high value. I use the default of 50MB for block size and the backup test sample default is to only download 1 block for verification.)
  4. I would also prefer the CrashPlan way of displaying the restore versions. I believe it has been discussed in the forum and it’s being considered for a future version.
3

B2 application keys might work, but need more testing and some docs on setup (assuming no issues arise). Linux Mint 19 and Backblaze B2 got in this some, but I haven’t heard from @PhilD41 if later work went well.

4

Please please implement 4 - it is the feature I use most on Crashplan.

5

I assumed it was either this or that it needed some index or something before backing up.

B2 provides a locally calculated checksum on each upload, which covers the integrity of the upload, so nothing really needs to be downloaded as long as checksums are kept per upload (chunk?).

I suppose technically this doesn’t cover the actual backup content but I would have hoped that is verified before uploading. You have to trust the system at some point!

6

Thank you for the pointer - I got a successful connection by using the KeyId for my AccountID.