First of all, Duplicati is a great software! Thanks for your work!
About my question.
I have a home server on which Duplicati is installed. I backup daily, various folders from the C: drive, encrypted to OneDrive. The data of the local folders come from my PC on which Syncback sends once a day all the changes from the folders on my PC to the folders of the home server. This all works 1A.
But now I would have to import an older Acronis image of the C: drive. It is clear that the backup folders are no longer current in the image. That would not be bad, because Syncback would move all missing files from my PC back to the home server. But will Duplicati be able to continue the backup? Or would Duplicati get confused? So if it makes backups every day and then I import an Acronis image from 3 weeks ago.
So, you want to restore a full image on the server Duplicati is installed and running on?
You should definitely save your Duplicati databases before restoring the image (AppData/Local/Duplicati, or whatever path is shown on the database page) and replace them after the image is restored. Otherwise, Duplicati will “forget” all of the backup versions since the image was created.
When an outdated backup database sees a newer backup set on the remote storage, it will complain about unknown files and suggests to repair. Do not press the repair button, it will delete all newer backup versions. If that happens, you need to go to the database screen and do a recreate of the database. This will use the newer remote files to create a new, updated database, but it might take a while.
If you replace the database with the up-to-date version before running a backup, the rest should work fine. It will create a new version of all files that are different from the last backup.
Hey Jojo, Thanks for your fast replay. That was a very useful answer! So if I save the files of the backup in …AppData\Local\Duplicati\ (ther is the .sqlite databasefile) and later paste it back there, it doesn’t get anything from the new image? Is this for sure or a guess? That would be great.
“anything” is broad. It can’t get databases from old image restore because you updated them, right?
Your job database is on the Database screen. Your configuration for all jobs is Duplicati-server.sqlite. Locations vary sometimes (e.g. a Windows service is different). You can also sanity-check file dates.
It will get source files as always. For best continuity you should probably do Syncback before backup, however if you don’t then you’ll just get a Duplicati version whose files are three weeks too old awhile.
Duplicati expects the Source files to change. It has no way yet to protect itself against records reverts from restore of databases from an old image. so it’s important to keep job DB and destination aligned.
Migration to new PC - faq wanted has some other notes. Exporting a backup job configuration to a file (saving it somewhere secure) would be good practice to guard against server loss, but for this work it’s probably easier to put back all the latest configs by putting back the pre-Acronis Duplicati-server.sqlite.