Ok, so I’ve completed two successful migrations now. Both of my Dads computes are now backing up using Duplicati without having to completely re-transfer all the data over the internet from 500 miles away.
I achieved this by doing the following steps:
- Using a spare PC ( in my case a VM) I installed Crashplan and logged into the CrashPlan service using my Dada credentials
- I restored all his content to a temporary folder.
- I installed Duplicati and configured a backup job to backup all the contenti n that temporary folder to my server over my home LAN. The job was configured to run once only. I dod one PC with GPG and one with AES encryption just for the sheer hell of it.
- I then copied the .sqlite database and the exported duplicati backup job to My Dads compter and imported the job and put the sqlite dataabse in the correct folder, making sure to check the path to the .sqlite database and the content being backed up before continuing.
- I ran the backup job on the remote computer, which worked, but complained that thousanda of files were not listed in teh database, and requested a database rebuild. - not unexpected, I would say
- I rebuilt the dabase and then the backup job quickly re-synchronised without sending all the backup data again.
I did have a few issues with in-use files not backing up correctly, so I just filtered them out. Files such as Temp fiels, Google cache fles and ntuser.dat files.
not the backups on both machiens are divorced from their dependency on CrashPlan.
I’m not doing the reverse so that the my crashplan backed up data on my Dads computer gets migrated to Duplicati. The interesting part here is that I’m using Windows subsystem for Linux on my dats PC as a handy way of delivering SSH access, with certificate driven access controls and data transfer. Settig that up was fun as I had to convert some dynamic DNS scripts I use on Ubuntu to work properly. Windows Subsystem for Linux is not a complete Ubuntu image by any stretch of the imagination, some simple tools are not implemented fully, like netstat or tcpdump. I’m still not quite sure of cron is working properly…
Suffice to say I have a workable setup now, and so long as I can figure out how to configure Duplicati to work purely on certificate exchange for SSH file transfers, then I’ll be finished.
Thought you might want to know my progress.
Greg