As new Duplicati user on MacOS the experience feels a bit rough so far. Some examples:
-
Default download for MacOS is the
.dmg
file. However, that one does not install Duplicati with auto-start after a reboot. For that you would need to download the.pkg
file. Why is that not the default? Or alternatively, why doesn’t Duplicati offer me to enable auto-start when it runs the first time? -
When creating a backup set, it will include everything by default. For most users that is way too much and gives problems with file locking (see also my next items). Another well known backup application uses the list below as the default exclusions (it takes 10 minutes to set these manually). It would be great to have these set by default on MacOS, or have a single one-line option to set all these.
.DocumentRevisions-V100
.MobileBackups
.MobileBackups.trash
.Spotlight-V100
.TemporaryItems
.Trash
.Trashes
.dbfseventsd
.dropbox
.dropbox.cache
.fseventsd
.hotfiles.btree
.vol
Backups.backupdb
Cache
Caches
DerivedData
node_modules
Logs
*/iTunes/iTunes Media/Downloads
*/iTunes/iTunes Media/Podcasts
*/iTunes/Album Artwork
*/iTunes/Previous iTunes Libraries
*/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter
*/Library/Application Support/Dropbox
*/Library/Application Support/Google
*/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
*/Library/Application Support/com.apple.LaunchServicesTemplateApp.dv
*/Library/Biome
*/Library/Caches
*/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
*/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/DataVaults
*/Library/Developer
*/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
*/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight
*/Library/Mirrors
*/Library/PubSub/Database
*/Library/PubSub/Downloads
*/Library/PubSub/Feeds
*/Library/Safari/Favicon Cache
*/Library/Safari/Icons.db
*/Library/Safari/Touch Icons Cache
*/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db
*/Library/Safari/HistoryIndex.sk
*/Library/VoiceTrigger/SAT
*/MailData/AvailableFeeds
*/MailData/BackingStoreUpdateJournal
*/MailData/Envelope Index
*/MailData/Envelope Index-journal
*/MailData/Envelope Index-shm
*/MailData/Envelope Index-wal
-
Next I got many errors during backups. For example
“Access to the path ‘/Users/yoriz/Library/...’ is denied.”
. It could not access large parts of my harddisk. Took me some time searching the forums to learn that I need to enable “Full Disk Access” in the MacOS Settings for the Duplicati app to work correctly. Again, shouldn’t that be the default? Or at least have the installer open the corresponding pane from Settings with an explanation what the user should do? -
Now I still get errors during backup, because certain files are in use:
The process cannot access the file ‘/Users/yoriz/Library/...’ because it is being used by another process.
That is to be expected on a running system, right? So there must be more users running into this error. I have not yet solved this problem. The–snapshot-policy = required
option is broken on MacOS:An error occurred trying to start process '/Applications/Duplicati.app/Contents/MacOS/lvm-scripts/find-volume.sh' with working directory '/'. No such file or directory
I will continue searching the forums for a fix for the above problem, because there must be more users running into this. I fear that after fixing this I will run into yet another problem…
The defaults settings for MacOS can be improved. As a typical MacOS user, I don’t want to hunt for obscure low-level options and settings. I want to install Duplicati and just run it with the defaults. I am happy to help the developers improve this.
Question to other MacOS users: what options/settings do you recommend for a user that simply wants to backup his entire harddisk?
P.S., Even after I enabled Full Disk Access, I still get errors when backing up files from other users: UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path '/Users/otheruser/Documents' is denied.
. I have again an hour of searching the forums ahead of me…