I am new to Duplicati. I signed up and logged in here because of a related problem I saw today. I’ve been saving backups to a 2 TByte USB disk drive, Windows 11. ALL of the Duplicati backup files disappeared, gone, vanished. Here is what I think happened, and how you could help prevent it.
In my early experiments it created the expected backup files but I have occasionally gotten “files missing in local database” messages which I have tried to Repair. The activity message at the top of the page can be misleading and never clearly says when a Repair is finished. Combined with the sometimes slow response I cannot always know what it is doing, if anything at all. That may have induced me to do something which interrupted an ongoing operation. I noticed the lost files only because I decided to try deleting the local version of an unimportant file to see how the restoration worked. THERE WAS NO WARNING ABOUT THE LOST BACKUPS other than the Please Repair notices which didn’t seem to work.
At this point I deleted my databases and configurations, then created new configurations. As before, when I ran it I got surprising “files missing in database, please repair” messages again, as if it didn’t remember all the file names in the folder I had just told it to include.
After I got the backups working again I also finally realized that when it said it was performing a backup (I forget the exact wording) it was actually restoring the local database, not the remote backup files. Only later did I notice the “No backup performed” notice on that configuration. Fortunately I have just begun and have not yet needed any backup I have attempted. All seems to be working now.
More informative messaging might prevented a possible disaster had I actually needed any backup.
Thanks.
BTW, I dislike github.