Hi, should I relocate these databases to HDDs? Am asking cos restoration ate up more of the SSDs’ lifecycle % than I am comfortable with.
Hey there,
Moving the databases to HDD is a reasonable call if SSD wear is a genuine concern. Duplicati’s local databases are SQLite files that get read heavily during deduplication lookups on every backup run, and read even more intensively during restores when it maps each block back to the source. The writes during a restore are significant but the reads are the real hammer.
The main tradeoff is speed. With the database on an HDD you will notice longer backup times because each chunk Duplicati processes requires a database lookup, and rotational latency adds up when that happens thousands of times per run. Restores will be slower too since block location lookups are sequential against a spinning disk. If your backup sets are large (hundreds of GB or more), this can be noticeable.
If you want to split the difference, one option is to move the database to an HDD for steady-state operation and temporarily copy it back to SSD before doing a restoration. Duplicati lets you point to a custom database location per backup job, so you could keep separate copies if that workflow makes sense.
Also worth checking: how large are your backup sets and how often are you doing full restores? Modern SSDs have TBW ratings in the hundreds of terabytes. Unless you are doing restores of very large datasets regularly, the wear may be less alarming than the percentage figure suggests, especially if the SSD is already several years old and the percentage change looks dramatic even for normal writes.
Short answer: yes, moving to HDD works fine and Duplicati will cope, just expect slower backup and restore times.
Best of luck with it.
Datasets are/will be in TBs, some with less than 100 files but most jobs will be in thousands of files
Thankfully there is no need to do full restorations all the time, it was just the recent tests (as mentioned in my other threads) that made me realise how intense these are on the SSDs. Kopia does not have this issue, which makes this worrying and thus prompted me to ask here
It’s even more puzzling since the SSDs involved are varied in age (one SATA and made/bought around 2013?, one NVME and made/bought around 2019) and the similar behavior is observed regardless of OS (Windows, Linux) and machine
PS: (yes I am seeing why Kopia is more recommended but considering that I have some Duplicati backup jobs spanning at least half a decade, I am reluctant to change backup solutions to say the least!)