Hi…I’m considering using Duplicati to back up around 700GB of data…of which roughly 450GB is a single VM image. Backup would be to external hard drive via USB.
What version should I be looking at? I’m a bit freaked out that version 2 is still considered “Beta” as normally that would imply “not production ready”, but the previous version is no longer supported.
Thanks!
I have been using said “beta” for over three years with fewer problems than I get from my text editor.
Welcome to the forum @cbf123
Duplicati 1.3.4 is a 2013 release with an extremely different design, and no forward migration path.
I’d strongly recommend against using anything that old, because almost nobody can offer support.
Duplicati 2.0.5.1 has solved many of the failures that some saw in 2.0.4.5/23, and is pretty reliable.
Newer versions in the Canary channel generally have newer bug fixes, but also possible new bugs. Reading the forum and GitHub issues can reveal issues, but it’s from 3 million backups per month.
The Beta is the generally suggested release but there is always the question of when to exit Beta…
Software is never perfectly reliable, perfectly bug-free, or perfectly easy to use for use cases seen.
For example you might want to use VSS for your image (or is VM down?). That’s still a bit awkward, because Windows (if this is Windows) requires Administrator privileges or it won’t do the snapshot.
How essential is it to make that easy? So it’s not just production reliability, but also user experience.
Generally it’s best to have multiple backups (some remote) with different software for reduced risk. Duplicati could certainly be one of those. Basically give it a try and see if it does what you need it to, including doing occasional restore test (good idea for any backup) to make sure that restore works.