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Who's using Duplicacy for backups?
So far I was Restic for my personal servers and Arq on my Mac, but I switched to Duplicacy since it allows concurrent backups from multiple computers to take advantage of maximum deduplication. This is particularly good because lots of data is shared between my Nextcloud server for example and my Macs.
It's also fast and reliable according to reviews, it's actively maintained and there is a forum as well. I am using the web GUI which is awesome to set things up and restore. For some use it's free but the personal licenses to use the web GUI are quite cheap, especially after the first year.
What has impressed me a lot is the backup speed, both for the initial backup and the incremental backups after. On my Mac it took 7 hours for the initial backup of 450 GB and now it takes just a minute to create APFS snapshot, index the data and do the incremental backup. Much faster than Arq and Restic. I also did some test restores and while they were slower than the backups, they worked just fine and were still quite fast.
Has anyone here used Duplicacy for a while and can comment on the reliability?
Comments
I forgot to mention that I am using iDrive e2 as primary storage and Backblaze B2 as secondary (Duplicacy can copy the backup snapshots from primary to secondary, which is quicker than repeating the same backup to another destination).
I have used it a fair amount for past 6+ months. Particularly like its deduplicatiom feature and its identical-copy feature. It feels quite snappy to backup and restore too. I also use duplicacy-util to control filters and automate backup, prune and copy operations via cron. duplicacy-util also has email notifications which is useful to notify on failed backups.
I used duplicacy it to restore about two times in past 6 months and worked out very well. No issues.
Pretty reliable so far in my experience. Its a good solid product and cross platform too.
Nice to hear. Which storage service(s) do you use?
Idrive e2 and a mixture of (sftp or sshfs mounted linux filesystem)
I started with iDrive e2 and Backblaze B2 but now I am going to test Storj since it was recommended in the Duplicacy forum. I tried SFTP (NetDynamics and Hetzner storage box) and performance was shit compared to object storage. I am annoyed that I paid for one year for NetDynamics because I didn't know there would be such a big difference.
It's really annoying they called their software "Duplicacy" when Duplicity and Duplicati both already existed.
I've considered using it for backing up Windows systems.
The issue I have with most backup systems is that they don't have good protection against malware - ransomware in particular. Often, the remote backup is mounted via a protocol that allows full access (e.g. SFTP/SSHFS, NFS, FTP, etc), which means that ransomware could both encrypt all your files and delete all the backups.
Borgbackup avoids this by having an "append only" mode, which can be enabled per SSH key (meaning you can have an SSH key for append-only and another one for full access). When append-only mode is in use, the client system can still 'delete' a backup, but the backup is only marked as deleted and is not actually deleted server-side. Backups that are just marked as deleted can be easily reverted back to a non-deleted state.
However, you need to have a remote server to use Borgbackup. It can't back up directly to cloud storage. That's where storage VPS deals come in handy though, and you can sync the storage VPS to cloud storage
I like it, no problems using b2, s3, local and sftp targets.
Don't forget Duplicacy does lifetime licenses on Black Friday.
Duplicati sucks a big one.
Nice, I can buy licenses on BF then since it's just before the end of my trial.
I agree Duplicati is total rubbish and unreliable
I also use idrive e2
rclone backups config, databases and files on a regular basis and I also back up my android pos system and data using the e2 app
Being able to create buckets around the world means I back up my London services to London and SG services in SG.
No brainer for me.
So you are not using Duplicacy it seems?
Apologies. I meant to add to that and then had a call and just hit the post button
I have tried it and its a great piece of kit but I run several servers and services and basically I can do that free rather with the setup I have than the $30-50/computer.
Only thing bad I would have to say about it really. Its a needless cost when it can be free or a much smaller cost.
The cli version of duplicacy is free for personal use as far as I understand.
For your own personal files yes. Nothing business related.
Although it is not a problem of our service, please open a ticket with us and we will cancel your service and refund you for the 11 remaining months.
PS We have Borgbackup installed and many of our clients are happy using it. Maybe you should give it a try?
Wow that's nice of you! I will open a ticket. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with your service, actually yours was faster than Hetzner's but with Duplicacy there was a big improvement with object storage because I could use many threads for backups, since these services have many servers etc. With SFTP based backend instead, increasing threads can actually worsen the backup performance due to disk trashing.
I considered Borg but it's anyway much slower than Duplicacy+object storage. Duplicacy with iDrive literally flies
Kudos to @NetDynamics24 , they promptly gave me a prorated refund although the problem I was having was not a fault with their service. Thanks!
Agreed. I tried kopia with idrive e2 and it was super fast. Almost 5-6 times faster than sftp backend. Pretty sure its the same with duplicacy also.
With SFTP it was like 2-3 MB/sec for me. With iDrive it maxed out my upload at almost 50 MB/sec (I have 1000/400).
@vitobotta If I remember correctly you used restic before, didnt you?
How would you compare it performance wise to duplicacy?
I'm using restic with it's own REST-server, would be interesting to know how much it differs in performance.
Duplicacy to object storage seems significantly faster from what I've seen. However I really love the ease of use of Restic.
Duplicacy is really good, but the price frankly makes it less palatable. Their GUI is also quite easy to use.
So I just purchased a license (on Black Friday) for my home NAS.
For some of the other production servers, I like the rclone+iDriveE2 combo for simplicity and practicality, along with easy backup scripts that I wrote myself.
Yeah, I like restic. I think it's underrated as a backup solution, it works really well and as you say, it's so easy to use.
Update: I found the reason why performance sucked when I tested backing up to NetDynamics and it wasn't anything I would have suspected. I received a late notice from Elisa, my broadband provider, to apologise for a technical problem that reduced my broadband speed from 1 Gbps to 50 Mbps for several hours, and I happened to test backing up to NetDynamics during that time. That explains why it was uploading only a few MB/sec. Therefore I purchased again the storage from NetDynamics and it's now uploading at pretty good speed
The only difference is that I am using Borg now instead of Duplicacy, because now that the problem is solved, Borg via regular SSH seems actually faster than Duplicacy with SFTP.
BTW for me the difference in speed between @NetDynamics24 in the Netherlands and Hetzner Storage Box in Falkenstein is quite noticeable, with ND being quite a bit faster
Thank you for the feedback and glad to know you have good speeds now with our service.
The same backup of 325 GB finished in 2 hours. With Hetzner Storage Box it took 8 hours!
Can anyone recommend another provider like NetDynamics that has affordable backup storage with Borg support? I want to have backups with two different providers for redundancy and I will cancel the storage box with Hetzner if I find something faster.
Very important for us to know it. Thanks for sharing. Enjoy your service!
Any time! You were so kind with the refund although it was not a problem with your service I am happy to be a customer still
With cloud-storage providers you can do that by restricting the api-calls(no remove, only write & list). I do this with b2 on servers. I prune on my PC once in a while.
Syncthing is very good on low end devices such as rPI 2/3. Fantastic performance and reliability.