Reducing local disk use

I’m about a week in to using Duplicati to backup 46GB across two backup jobs, with the backup files uploaded to Tardigrade/StorJ. I noticed yesterday that the number of bytes written to disk by the “mono-sgen64” process is really high. My concern is that this might unnecessarily shorten the life of my laptop SSD, and, it just doesn’t seem necessary to write so much to disk when only KBs are being uploaded per run.

Based on when the process started, I’m averaging 12.5GB/day written to local disk (as reported by macOS Activity monitor).

In the Duplicati settings, I enabled “synchronous-upload”, thinking that this would prevent writing to the temporary folder. The process is still writing about 1GB /hour to local disk.

The two sqlite DBs for these backup jobs are 656MB and 192MB, so I would guess it isn’t database access that’s increasing the bytes written.

Is this normal? Any ideas on what I can do to reduce this number?

Thank you!

My default options are:

  • concurrency-block-hashers: 1
  • concurrency-compressors: 1
  • concurrency-max-threads: 1
  • synchronous-upload: checked
  • thread-priority: idle

Some backup-specific options:

  • Remote volume size: 64MB
  • asynchronous-concurrent-upload-limit: 1
  • auto-cleanup: checked
  • backup-test-samples: 0
  • list-verify-uploads: checked
  • no-auto-compact: checked
  • zip-compression-method: LZMA
  • Backups are configured to run hourly
  • Encryption is turned off

That actually opens up new questions in my mind. I was going to say that Duplicati does x amount for validation and I think that can be changed (I briefly came across that before but others here would know better about that) but really that should be able to be done in memory only. I think that does write to disk but could be wrong.

Perhaps various ideas here might be of help for different settings Does duplicati download any data? - #13 by JonMikelV

You could lower the amount as well by avoiding backing up larger files that won’t ever change and just back them up once manually without Duplicati.