Recommended Hardware if building from scratch?

Hello everyone,

Is there a “recommended” hardware configuration if one is going to use Duplicati 2 as a replacement for an enterprise product? We currently use an older (12.5) version of Backup Exec. We are licenses with Google for unlimited storage and I was thinking it might be a fun project to migrate our old backups to Duplicati and target Google Drive as the storage location for the backups. With all that in mind, is there a recommended hardware configuration for a dedicated Duplicati server? Is Windows or Linux better? How much memory? Backups would be running on a GB backbone and our internet connection is 300MB up/down.

I’m trying to stick with the more traditional centralized backup server model although I realize I could just install Duplicati on any server requiring data to be backed up.

I look forward to your advice!

For enterprise backups? No way…

Hello @cbsarge, welcome to the forum - and thanks for your interest in Duplicati!

As you may have noticed, the most stable version of Duplicati is still a beta version so, while it is very stable and many people use it without issue, it might not be the best choice right now for enterprise use.

That being said, your question about a “dedicated Duplicati server” leaves me a little confused. Duplicati only runs on the machine with content needing to be backed up - the destination for the files just has to be accessible by the Duplicati software (so local drive, network share, FTP, SFTP, cloud storage, etc.).

While the idea of a Duplicati server doesn’t really apply, on the machine where backups need to be run the question is a bit more applicable. Generally Duplicati doesn’t “need” a lot of resources to run - but running isn’t the same as running quickly.

At the moment, my guess is the biggest slow down is disk IO - particularly with the local database access, so having an SSD on which to store the local Duplicati database would be good.

The same goes for the temp folder usage - an SSD would be great, but having Duplicati do temp processing in memory (or on a ram drive) is good too.

If you’re wanting to use a high level of encryption then a fast CPU would be good.

On the Windows vs. Linux side, it shouldn’t really matter - but since Duplicati is written in .NET it will run “natively” on Windows but requires mono to run on Linux / MacOS. This isn’t a big deal, but it is an extra layer of software to have to maintain (mono isn’t the best at keeping SSL certificates up to date).

It really all depends on what your goal is - to run, to run fast, to saturate your bandwidth…it’s hard to say because it all depends so much on individual environments.

I guess I was thinking of using it like you would use Backup Exec. All the backup jobs would be configured and run from one or two central servers. Duplicati would be run as a service using the domain Admin account so all resources would be accessible using the $ admin shares. My plan is to use Duplicati and it’s native Google Drive support in a similar model. The server(s) would have jobs configured and scheduled to run targeting network servers. Rather than storing the data on LTO tapes as we do now I would write them to Google Drive to which we have an unlimited storage subscription. All jobs would be managed and monitored from the Duplicati server(s) rather than running individual jobs on all of the servers themselves. We are a Windows shop so we would run Duplicati on Windows servers. All the servers in question are connected by Gigabit switches and backups to Google Drive would be over a 300MB connection. I’ve already started some testing and the jobs seem to max out in the 4 to 5 MB/second range with drops to the KB/s range when I’m guessing it’s building new files to upload. I’ve set the upload file size to 1 GB and added the following two lines to my settings:

–zip-compression-level=0
–asynchronous-upload-limit=0

Crazy? Any thoughts good or bad? We wouldn’t be making a move to this solution until it was HEAVILY tested with restores, validations, etc.

Good plan. :smiley:

Duplicati is designed for “local” drives - so anything that you can make look like a local drive should work, but performance will vary depending on a lot of settings.

So while what you’re planning isn’t something we normally test for, should work just fine. If it does, please come back and share how well (and how fast) it worked for you.

As JonMikeIV pointed out, Duplicati is designed for local drives. If you COULD get it to read the remote drive somehow, it would not be able to remotely trigger a VSS snapshot.

Backup Exec is actually an enterprise class backup product, albeit probably an entry level one in this market. (There are definitely much higher end enterprise backup products out there.)

I am a fan of Duplicati for home stuff but I would never dream of using it for business/enterprise backups.