First of all thanks, I was looking for a replacement for file history. This looks fantastic I just want to backup to an external hard drive and don’t really need my files accessible anywhere else. But hey there is another question here! Just in the process of doing my first big backup to 4TB external drive and files backed up are in the region of 1TB. I was wondering how warm the Ext Hard drive was and considered giving it a break to cool down a little! But…when I press pause it doesn’t! I have tried various settings for pause eg for 5mins or when told to resume etc but it doesn’t stop. Am I being stupid or is this a bug? Thanks.
Welcome to the forum @lloydjon
I think this is a combination of not understanding the code author’s intention, plus the manual diverging. Because author is rarely available, I will try to pick a statement that I hope is Duplicati 2, not Duplicati 1:
When you pause Duplicati, it does not pause the running backup, but rather prevents new job from starting.
then a part that probably doesn’t affect your hard drive, but would cause problems on network uploads:
When uploading, data is combined into dblock files, which are uploaded. If there are dblock files being transferred, they will be transmitted before stopping the backup. If the upload was paused instead, there would be timeouts on the connection and other sideeffects. No new dblock files will be produced before stopping the backup.
The stop button runs into the same problem, but has more GUI lead through. You have a choice of stop after current file being prepared for upload, or stop now which is a bit faster. Either way, upload finishes.
How Much Does Hard Disk Temperature Matter? is one view of that but there are others on the Internet.
If you worry about drive health (momentary or long-term) you could use a SMART monitor tool, such as
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Hi there and thanks for your very helpful response. I am sorry it has taken so long to reply. On a slightly different tack I wonder just how things work when a machine falls over. How easy is it to reinstate files from a external hard drive onto a new drive/computer? Is it just a matter of installing the software on the new machine and then accessing the files from the external drive? is there a help file somewhere that describes this process. Again thanks for your previous response. All seems to working well at the moment, I guess the hard drive works hardest when you you first back up but there is very little activity on the drive now so not concerned about the HD over heating.
Restoring files if your Duplicati installation is lost will do reinstate, assuming you remember/saved basic information such as the decryption passphrase and destination access information (easy for local drive).
Exporting a backup job configuration to a file then saving it safely in advance of disaster will alternatively let you Import from a file (the one you saved) and database Repair to rebuild a database on new system. After that you can do regular Restore to reinstate the files, and continue doing Backup as you did before.
It is safest to test at least parts of this occasionally to get an idea of the timings, and be sure it still works. Disaster Recovery gets in this a bit. Duplicati.CommandLine.RecoveryTool.exe is the last-resort recovery which can help if a database won’t recreate, but it’s best to occasionally rename it and then test a Repair.