This again has historical elements which are already set. I find any bring-your-own-storage to be hard compared to services where bundled storage is part of your fee. Storage flexibility is liked … by some.
There is a backlog of requests for more storage types, and some pull requests have contributed code.
https://usage-reporter.duplicati.com/ has breakdowns and shows that backups run about 6 million/year, with not every one having difficulties like yours, so why yours is worse would still be worth looking into, although this would need your help. If you don’t want to spend time on it, fine, but it may simply persist.
What’s there is what’s there until somebody volunteers to try to improve it. You’re talking to volunteers.
More would always be nice, and there are many many opportunities. Thanks to those who are helping.
That aside, it does take some effort to fathom the large flexibility that Duplicati provides. See this also:
Different ways to make a Duplicati backup is a similar many-paths concern that one might wrestle with. Sometimes one needs a command line to do things, but there are two, and it’s hard to know how to go. Database itself has pros and cons, and different database for different ways of use is very confusing…
So I agree it’s not the easiest thing, but it’s flexible. I don’t know if its flexibility hurts core stability much, which is basically your main complaint, I think. It’s sometimes worth talking likes/dislikes, so here goes.
Personally, I kind of like the UI compared to others I’ve seen, and some software can’t do VSS at all so avoid the how-to-configure problem that way. For me, Duplicati is nice. I also like low storage use from deduplication, good retention control, easy ability to itemize what I want backed up with one single job.
Some software does focus on simplicity. Backblaze has one that’s simple-setup, but lacks other things. What to use is really a personal choice. Use what fits you and that works adequately for your situation.
If DBMS means SQL, help is also needed, but as a developer you likely know that bug chasing is tough.
Volunteers needed. If you can write or do GitHub, have at it. This is a separate project, maintained here.
Others had the same idea, as evidenced by the first quote of old web site news, but “stable” is relative.
https://sites.google.com/a/duplicati.com/duplicati/news
In the last year Duplicati 2.0 became more and more stable, but we also introduced some new features that were a bit shaky in the beginning.
GUI itself followed pure command-line. It attracts new users, who then find all the bugs missed before. There’s nothing like a growing increasingly diverse set of uses and environments to uncover problems.
Developers are sometimes not as good (or as motivated) to test for bugs as they are to lay down code. Without a team of testers (volunteers?) and a big lab (who’s buying?), bugs sadly are found in the field, where they are harder to get information on (I’m still trying), which is one reason they aren’t solved yet.
If you said Duplicati was an ambitious effort for one person to try in their spare time, I agree completely, however it does things no similar competitor can do. Providing a GUI at all puts it into a rare category…
To even think about mounting a project like this takes some optimism. Supports helps more than critics.
There’s not much point arguing about history and whether there was a better path. Its path was its path.
There are some other past and current efforts to commercialize backup software begun by a tiny team. Backblaze personal backup has some interesting stories to tell on how they grew and went public BUT:
Does Backblaze support Volume Shadow Copy? No, and it’s also working on a restore from local client:
Feature request: Backblaze 9.0 built-in-restore-download-manager
There are a couple of commercial GUI wrappers for restic who seem to want to stay CLI in short term. Duplicacy mostly-one-dev is trying to achieve business success. I’m not sure how one-dev Arq is faring.
The latter two projects are probably trying to produce sufficient revenue to support some living expense, which is a pretty tall order. It’s not clear how much revenue would solve lack of developers. May be lots, paying typical development salaries. Token amount (I’m thinking of bug bounties) has had little success.
As a side note, there’s a circular dependency. You’d want to productize a reliable product, wouldn’t you, although there’s certainly precedent for commercial products not being quite fully baked, at least at first. Some of this has to do with previous comments about how in-house testing can’t replace all external…
Not charging would (and does) seem to attract a lot of them. Donations cover some costs, but not devs.
There’s more free software for those who want a CLI on Linux. Duplicati seems pretty unique to me but newer entrant Kopia is getting in some of the same space, though VSS is more do-it-yourself than here.
While the big-name backup services do tend to be a package deal, software alone is still obtainable, but one might argue over what reasonable is (especially a question if it gets into servers or a lot of systems). Larger companies might take more shopping and more money. For something tiny, Duplicacy and Kopia seem to be places that unsatisfied Duplicati users are attracted too (sometimes finding issues there too).
If you have a specific storage type that you like, vendors sometimes have lists of backups they can use:
Backblaze B2 Integrations
Technology Alliance Partners (Wasabi)
are just a couple of examples of ways that you can break out the cloud service charge from the software some of which is likely aimed (and priced) at business. There are still some less costly things around too.
So that was all a big digression from working on any actual issue, but may add perspective and options.
Just my 2 cents. I can’t point you to a perfect solution, or solve every issue, but we can do what we can.
