Duplicati

This review is based on the "experimental" version 2.0.

Duplicati is fantastic software for backing up your files. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux. You select a folder or folders for it to keep and eye on, and corresponding folders where your backed up files should end up. It then asks for a schedule - how often it should look for changes and make a backup. It can listen every six minutes or more. The interface is based in your internet browser, a little bit like SyncThing, but even smoother in the way it works.

Although Duplicati has built in support to talk directly to online Sync/backup services, such as Dropbox, this is a little unnecessary, since you can tell the clients of such services simply to watch out for a particular folder, and you can choose the destination folder discussed above.

More impressive is that Duplicati comes with optional encryption for your files. When choosing the folder the app is watching, you choose also the encryption option and a (hopefully strong) password. With that setup, Duplicati will not only produce a backed up verion of your files, but encrypt them along the way using the very strong AES-256 standard. This way, if the destination folder is being monitored by a backup or sync client (e.g. of Dropbox), only encrypted versions of your files will be put into the cloud. That is very important for maintaining your online privacy, because Dropbox and related services have access to all your files, and have been known to a) get hacked, b) pass on people's info (files included) to law enforcement. Duplicati even hides the size and structure of your files. If you use encryption to backup, say, a 700 Mb file (ahem), the encrypted output from Duplicati will be 14 x 50MB files, which are unreadable to anyone who doesn't have the password. Moreover, to restore a file from backup, you enter the password and it restores the file structure in a menu, so you can pick what you want from all the files you backed up without having to decrypt/restore everything (unless you want to).

The only comparable app to this is Cryptomator, which also encrypts on a file-by-file basis, but is more tuned to syncing than to backups. (Check that out also: it's excellent for protecting your privacy if you're using the Cloud.)

Duplicati is brilliant, and the developer deserves a medal. Or, if you prefer, a donation. It's really a great thing that software this useful is freely available and open source. Highly recommended.

This seems very poorly designed.

You can try to backup ~2 TB of data and it says that it needs to backup 600 TB(!), probably from following recursive symlinks or something? There's no obvious way to find out where the links are or how to exclude them.

Or it tells you there's been an error, and when you click "Show" it shows a list of plain text dates that aren't obviously clickable. If you click one, it shows you a dump of json(?) code that means very little. You can search for "error" and try to find the errors that way.

If you've requested a folder to be backed up and the folder is then deleted, Duplicati just stops backing up anything! Your data could very easily be lost.

[Edited by endolith, July 16]

After months of using this, I've lowered my rating to the worst score. It's highly buggy and poorly-written, and there's little helpful support on their forum.

After more than a year of using Duplicati for remote and local backups in multiple computers I found Duplicati to be a very bad option for backups. My main concern being low performance.

The excluding filters are confusing and sometimes seem to not work at all. This is the first time I've had problems with such a feature.

Although is nice having a web interface is absurdly slow and takes a lot of resources.

Backing up should be something that happens in the background. When backups started I often had to stop doing something because of it.

I chose Duplicati because of it's scheduling and copy retention options, and the deduplication, I've since found alternatives that satisfy my requirements and have moved on from Duplicati.

The reason I am giving two stars instead of one is because despite its defects, it has helped me recover files, so at least it does its job.

I was using Duplicati on endeavourOS (ArchLinux) for quite a Year and while it was working it did it's job as expected - but it seems you have to be lucky, because "Never worry about your backups again", as they state on their website, is definitely not the case - at least for me.

Often times there are errors accessing local folders. You have to give the software root-access - just to backup my personal files? Suspicious, but i have done so and then it seemed to work for a while, but then after some time it loses access again.

And that's the worst: If you not regularly take a look in the WebInterface you do not even notice that your BACKUPS AREN'T RUNNING properly (In my case because of the access-error the software thinking backing up ZERO Files is a good value and just outputs a warning in the WebInterface.)

For non-techies like me there are NO DESKTOP-NOTIFICATIONS (TrayIcon etc.) enabled by default and in the settings menu there is nothing about it. (Yes, obviously there is an API for all kinds of notifications, but no, that's not how an desktop-application should work by default).

Speaking of desktop application: There is none. You have to do everything in the Browser. Of course if you want to support Win+Mac+Linux this is easier to develop, but for the user the look-and-feel (UI/UX) doesnt't match with anything, it just feels not right. The WebInterface looks more like a workaround than a application.

Overall: I think the 700 open Issues on GitHub are speaking for itself.

Complet pour sauvegarder mes données, utilisé depuis longtemps, jamais rien eu à lui reprocher, il est parfait.

It's beta software. Beta software should NEVER be a recommendation on pages like this, let alone the top suggestion.

As for Duplicati itself... I tried one backup. Setup is relatively easy, except when you take a look at the advanced options, which are just tech speak. Strings that only the devs understand. And when you do start the backup, you don't actually get all the information you'd like. It stores all its data in zip files. But you don't get to know if those are compressed and you don't get to set whether or not you want any compression at all.

The backup I started took 5 hours and then froze. One a Duplicati AppData file, I might add. When you cancel the process, you get a choice: stop now or stop after current file. Stop now just stops after the current file anyway. It's not a choice. At least, it tells you it'll stop. But when it's frozen, it can't actually complete the current file so your backup will never end. And you can't end it except by killing the process in task manager.

That is such a basic mistake that it's basically unforgiveable. I'm sure a lot of you will think "it worked fine for me", but that doesn't excuse this. And honestly, even if it did work for you, you should still reconsider using this. It cannot be trusted.

While it did save me from a hassle, when I could recover a file form the backup, it often causes to crash all may tabs in my default browser (Opera). I would suggest caution if you have several workspaces and you are opening this app, before you have your browser open. I also had some issues when updating the app and I notice that there were no backups due to this. These are the reason why I can give it all five stars.