Hi There,
I have been using Duplicati for couple of months now, but the way Duplicati backsup the files into small files kinda Scares me, am using it for local BackUp and Google Drive BackUp with Encryption.
If Duplicati is no longer supported and such how am I able to get those backs and be able to read those files?
Thanks, Sorry for My english if its not too greate.
Hello
you could scope your question to get a meaningful answer. Duplicati is a client application that you install on your computer, so at any time you can download your files back on your source computer, that’s the whole purpose of a backup after all.
On the other hand if you want to speculate and think about the time where Duplicati stops being supported, AND you forget to get your files, AND Duplicati stops working on your new computer, AND you just forget about it and throw away your old computer before getting your files, you may install the Python script at https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati/tree/master/Tools/Commandline/RestoreFromPython that was developed just for that and then discover that it no longer works because Python itself has been deprecated and no longer installs on your new computer and you don’t know how to translate the script to use the language du jour. And Google Drive itself may have been deprecated too.
Rust Duplicati Restore is another one (inspired by the Python tool), also mentioned in the forum here.
The point is that as an open source project, people can build tools to read its format in an emergency.
You could be far worse with a commercial subscription backup that has none of this, and then closes.
You could do better if everything was a super common format such as exact file copies, or maybe zip, however the storage cost of having so much duplication will be far more. Such programs exist though.
Cobian Backup gets mentioned in the forum by people who really dislike having a complex file format. Cobian Reflector is a more recent tool, by the same author who sold his program then reimplemented.
There are others as well, but they give up lots of capability in exchange for a very simplified approach.
Duplicati is a backup tool, not designed for (and maybe not reliable enough for) archiving for decades. Technology always changes. For easier access by descendants, laser printed paper can last awhile…
Last updated 4 years ago and still doesn’t support encrypted or remote backups…Pretty limiting for a disaster recovery tool. 
Can’t speak about the Rust tool; however the Python tool is NOT a disaster recovery tool, it’s a last ditch in case of the Duplicati software stack being not supported anymore. Duplicati itself has already an integrated disaster recovery tool. Adding tons of code to support every backend in the Python tool would be a source of fragility in software support and as such a very bad idea.
Edit: made me think that I played with the Python tool to better understand the Duplicati disk structure, can as well contribute it now. enhance Python restore tool by gpatel-fr · Pull Request #5051 · duplicati/duplicati · GitHub
It’s a third-party tool that tries to address the problem mentioned in the first sentence of original post, which is nervous about Duplicati’s file format, and I point out that most programs use special formats.
Restore does require more, but there are solutions. For example decryption could be done using GUI encryption tool AES Crypt or one of the numerous other tools mentioned there for various OS flavors. Duplicati provides its own CLI tool in its installation folder – SharpAESCrypt.exe which will run even if project closes, so long as it’s on the system. Remote backups can be made local with numerous tools depending on what the destination type is. Duplicati does have a lot, but there are lots of other tools…
Also keep in mind that there is no great need for these currently, and if Duplicati vanishes, better ones would probably spring up to handle at least the more routine stuff such as doing the decryption for you. That’s typically AES, so goes with the above tools. GNU Privacy Guard has standard solutions, I think.
Duplicati’s own disaster recovery tool for yet a different sort of disaster (damaged destination) does the decryption as well as the transfer to local, although something like rclone could probably transfer faster.
Duplicati.CommandLine.RecoveryTool.exe
This tool can be used in very specific situations, where you have to restore data from a corrupted backup. The procedure for recovering from this scenario is covered in Disaster Recovery.