Hey everyone, just stumbled into Duplicati a few minutes ago after being moments away from buying my Arq license (trial ends today). I was coming from CrashPlan and while I like some things about Arq, I’m not wild about everything.
I’d love to hear from folks in this forum that have used Duplicati and either CrashPlan or Arq, on what the pros & cons are. Of course at this point going back to CrashPlan is out, so really it’s Arq vs. Duplicati.
I’m backing up to GSuite, many terabytes of data over 4 or 5 machines (Mac and Windows).
All insights are hugely appreciated so I can make a decision and stand by it. I’ll surf around the forum a bit as well and see what I can dig up.
Thanks!
I messed around with Arq a bit but it was too long ago. I don’t recall exactly what I didn’t like about it, but at the time I definitely preferred Duplicati.
I used CrashPlan for many years. Its demise is what led me to Duplicati. Things I like about Duplicati compared to CrashPlan:
Open source
Supports tons of back ends
No vendor lock-in
Web based interface
Some things are similar between the two:
Multiplatform
Deduplication
Encryption (trust no one)
Tiered version retention options
Try both Arq and Duplicati for a while and see which you like better. I probably tried 10 different products before settling on Duplicati.
Thanks for the reply. My main concerns about Arq based on my evaluation period with it, are that some of what it does is a bit opaque (not entirely clear what some of its error messages mean exactly, the removal of unreferenced objects is not entirely intuitive0 and restoration is extremely slow and clunky. Guess I’ll need to just run with Duplicati for a while and try some restores, to see how I like it.
Crashplan was fantastically intuitive and easy to use, and I miss that. Never really had to figure out anything with it, everything just worked exactly the way I imagined it would, especially restores which were easy and fast.
If anyone else has anything to add I’d love to hear from you. Thanks again!
I tried a lot of different bits of software, not just Arq but almost all of the ones I could find, too many to list.
For years I was using SpiderOak but their client is broken and can’t handle even moderate size backup sets without corrupting the entire thing. It’s also extremely slow and resource hungry. 100% CPU and gigabytes of RAM for days on end. Restores would often fail as it took too long to process and the network timed out, and this was a Xeon.
Anyway I settled on Duplicati and Jottacloud. Being open source and cross platform I don’t need to worry about proprietary formats or being tied to one particular cloud service. If Jottacloud ever goes bad I can easily switch.
It also lets you have as many backup sets as you like, minimizing risk if one becomes unrecoverable. But I think the way Duplicati stores data the chances of losing an entire set are slim anyway. And each set can have its own schedule and settings.
Duplicati isn’t perfect, it still has a few issues but for the most part it’s reliable, fast and fairly easy to use. It’s also transparent and resilient - I tested corrupting or deleting random archives in a set and it coped flawlessly.