One way sync and don't mirror?

[Pectojin]

@chaoscreater

Photos folder - I dumps photos taken from my phone and camera into this folder. Duplicati is configured to run a backup on the Photos folder at a certain time every week. Every now and then, I will go into the Photos folder on my local drive and delete photos that I don’t like. I want this to be reflected on the server as well. I don’t want to have to go into my Google Drive and then search for the photo and delete it.

That’s fine. That makes sense as it’s actually a backup use case.

@chaoscreater

Movies folder - compared to photos, movies aren’t important to me. I don’t care if I have a movie collection full of AAA and meh movies. If I’ve downloaded a movie and it is somewhat decent, I’d back them up and add it to my collection. If I delete the movie from my local disk, I don’t want Duplicati to also delete it from the server. I only delete it from my local disk to free up space and I don’t need to do that on the server side.

That’s what makes no sense to me. If you back them up with Duplicati and then delete them from the local disk you will have to write down or remember when you backed up the file to even find it in your backup. It’s going to be ridiculously difficult for you to find these movies without knowing when they were backed up.

@chaoscreater

These are just some examples of 1-way and 2-way (mirror) sync. I need a bit of flexibility here.

You have two completely different use cases and you’re trying to force them into 1 software that’s made for the first use case. Use two different softwares.

@chaoscreater

Yes, I understand that Duplicati chops the original file into smaller ones, compresses them and encrypts them. But I don’t understand how that is relevant to a 1-way or 2-way sync?

Because it literally cannot do 2-way sync. Duplicati, by definition, is a 1-way sync tool.
https://www.tgrmn.com/web/kb/item34.htm

In one-way sync, files are copied only from a primary location (source) to a secondary location (target) in one direction, but no files are ever copied back to the primary location. Replication and Backup (=Mirroring) are one-way sync methods in ViceVersa.

@chaoscreater

If I delete the file on the local disk, then I presume the 1000 files on the server will get deleted if it’s a 2-way sync. If not a 2-way sync, then the 1000 files will just stay on the server. If I were to restore that 20GB file,

1-way sync can delete files from the destination, the differentiation is that no changes made to the destination will ever be copied back to the source.

@chaoscreater

Main reason I’m using Duplicati is because of the encryption it does. My Google Drive storage is a business account and I don’t want the IT admins snooping in on my data

I would look into a solution to encrypt the files on disk before uploading them in Google drive. Encryption is not unique to Duplicati and there are plenty of tools that can encrypt your files while still allowing you to browse your files in a more useful way than trying to figure out which Duplicati backup your file is in.