I’ve been using Duplicati for a few years now, and it’s great. I’ve had a few occasions where I needed to restore something, and it has been perfect every time. I’ve really come to depend on it.
I’m curious, though, when does it stop being “beta?”
While I agree that for many things it does work very well, there are still a few issues that need to be resolved.
How many issues? There are currently 815 issues listed in the issues section for Duplicati on GitHub (180 of them have a bug label), sure they don’t all need to be resolved but a good many of them do and there are some very decent feature requests in there that could really help the software.
As always, volunteers for the project are in short supply so if you or anyone you know can help the project in any way, it’s appreciated.
Thanks again to all those that have helped to get the project to the point it’s at now.
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The total GitHub issues backlog is a little misleading. Some are enhancement requests which clearly aren’t done (there is an ample supply of potential enhancements, and a short supply of people – any volunteers?), while others are bugs of varying age (maybe fixed now?) and vagueness (how might one know if it’s fixed?).
One useful technique is to use the Sort selector to sort by Recently updated to see what’s getting notice. Because people who open issues are asked to look for duplicate open and closed ones, sometimes closed ones get posts (and sometimes attention). I generally try a query like below when I want to see new actions. This is basically what Sort choice gives, modified by letting in closed issues. One sees date of last update.
is:issue sort:updated-desc
Labels could possibly be done better. I see lots of things calling themselves feature requests that don’t have the enhancement label, but if one wants to ask anyway, the syntax to add to a query is label:enhancement .
There are seemingly bugs without a bug label, but improved labels requires volunteers, and they are scarce.
Forum has Features category, but there are also enhancement options in the other categories, e.g. Support.
Forum automatically sorts by recent updates, so scroll back to see what other people suffer from, or desire. You’ll find a huge range of opinions, but one factor to work in is that vague and rare issues are hard to solve.
For those who see an issue, write it up as well as possible, including steps to reproduce, from scratch, with minimal special equipment needs. That’s a good one to file as an actual Issue, because it can be dealt with.
Other problems require quite a bit of help to diagnose, and helpers are few and rather seriously overloaded.
https://usage-reporter.duplicati.com/ graph by compression and year shows near-linear growth since 2016.
Anybody who can help someone occasionally, read or write documentation, examine performance, follow a step-by-step to try to reproduce issues, read or write C#, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, test (or stress) software, etc. is strongly encouraged to do so. Duplicati relies totally on its volunteer community in order to progress.
Maybe when it becomes sufficiently enhanced, stabilized, and community-supported enough to merit that, factoring in potentially higher usage (maybe due to publicity?) and user expectations such change implies.
Duplicati is currently doing about 4 million backups per month, and even rare problems require volunteers. Everybody has something to contribute in some way, but if few people actually help, things don’t progress.
Agreed. Duplicati 2 has been in development about 10 years now, and many people have helped over time.
It’s not done yet, so if anybody finds it useful enough to support with your time, please consider helping out.
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