You know, I did read about Check block size on recreate by Pectojin · Pull Request #3758 · duplicati/duplicati · GitHub, but I assumed that since I’m using the latest beta with a version higher than when it was merged, that the fix was already in the beta, but I see now I was wrong. I’ll upgrade to the experimental version and try a restore to another machine again.
I’ll also try another suggestion from here and up the internal block size Logic and usecase for remote subfolders - #14 by kees-z.
Yesterday, I imported the profile I was trying to restore into my local Windows desktop and tried a db rebuild. To my surprise, it reached the same 2GB db size in sqlite relatively quickly, however, the backup did not begin at this point, and I saw no physical changes to the db size or the restore (the restored files never started appearing) - instead, the job kept doing something (I think downloading dblocks and very slowly doing some queries) and I ran out of patience and killed it this morning. What was it doing? I’m not sure, but it was definitely taking entirely too long to begin doing anything.
After my frustrations with duplicati, I also installed and compared it to duplicacy cli. While duplicacy web gui was kind of broken, I found that with cli, both backups and restores were robust and fast, so there’s a good benchmark for any future duplicati performance for me.
Be super-sure never to have two machines backing up to the same destination, doing repairs, etc.
Yeah, I didn’t set up any schedules or started doing any backups, only restores. In both cases a partial db restore from a direct restore and a full db rebuild from a configuration restore ended up extremely slow and never finished building the database in a reasonable amount of time.
For best certainty on test restore from machine to itself, add –no-local-blocks to its backup configuration.
And probably –no-local-db as well, right?
I’m not clear on all the machines being used, but I think Linux backup needs similar UNIX restore system.
I think what I found during a smaller test restore of a Linux backup to a Windows machine was that the Linux symlinks didn’t get restored (as opposed to maybe restoring files they point to in place of symlinks). I didn’t expect that part and permissions/ownership to work, so I didn’t look into whether there are special restore flags related to such a Linux → Windows scenario.