Questions about Duplicati (new user)

Support
1

Hello everyone. Im a new user, found Duplicati this week and i’m very grateful 'cause this such amazing software be free.

I have some questions, if anyone can answer me, is about the functions and I need to be sure if Duplicati will be useful to me.

  • Im thinking in backup my data to cloud service, like Google Drive or OneDrive: Even if I choose a non-encryption configuration, Duplicati always will transform my data into a blocks of data with a different extension? Is there a way to my data sented by Duplicati will be available in cloud, exactly as they are?

  • I have about 500GB of data that are some OLD jobs that Im already finish, files from 2005-2015 that maybe i will never use again, that I just need to storage, let in some safe place and forget. Are Duplicati suggested for this case?

  • If I have a pc failure and lost the “Duplicati configuration” that is saved in AppData, how I’ll be abble to acess my data again?

2

If you really want your backed up data to be in the same format as the original files, then Duplicati is not for you. Because Duplicati uses deduplication it will always break up your files into blocks and send those blocks to the backup storage (optionally with compression and encryption).

Are you sure you want native format? The deduplication that Duplicati provides gives you some nice benefits, like being able to efficiently store multiple versions of each file, have flexible retention options, etc.

3

Yes! I want this benefits, but only to my recent files, that I use along the year maybe.

But are this benefits really necessary to files that maybe i’ll never use again? (these older files from old jobs)

If not, what do you recommend to do with theses old files to “cold storage”? Thanks!

4

You could certainly manually archive those older files to Google Drive or One Drive. And then use Duplicati only for your active data.

5

And once again: If I have a pc failure and lost the “Duplicati configuration” that is saved in AppData, how I’ll be abble to acess my data again?

6

I save the configurations of my backup jobs. (Use the Export to file option.)

There are probably other ways it could be accomplished, too…

7

You can use the main menu “Restore” link to allow “Direct restore from backup files…” which doesn’t need any local config, however you DO need:

  • login for your destination (if applicable)
  • path to the backup files at the destination
  • Duplicati encryption passphrase (if there is one)

Of course once restored, you won’t have a Duplicati backup job to start backing up again UNLESS you do something like what @drwtsn32 suggested and manually export your backup job into a folder that’s included in the backup run.

As far as “original format” storage, @drwtsn32 is correct that Duplicati just plain doesn’t do that so another tool might be better for that set of data.

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