so I tried all three backup clients recommended for syncosync under Windows. I was dealing with 120,000 files totalling 1.7 TB worth of data. Here is my - personal and thus subjective - experience with them:
Duplicati 2.0
very easy to install, newbie-friendly
fast backup speed both on first backup and later snapshots
erroneous job control, e.g. when trying to cancel running backup jobs sometimes no reaction at all, also (I think) some strange behaviour when trying to continue a previously interrupted backup job
restore from existing (configured) backup job went smoothly
but: in case of a catastrophic event, the local configured backup job will no longer be available; I thus tried to restore a file just using the data in the backup, and there problems started; in particular it started to rebuild some database which progressed extremely slowly; after some 20 minutes or so I decided to cancel; this really did not instill trust in me
there are reviews on the net where people have commented; check out the comments by “Kevin Black” and “AJ” on this page: Duplicati Review 2022 [2.0 Features, Security & More] - I have to say, what “Kevin Black” writes agrees with my subjective impression; I did not feel that I could trust it in case of a full data loss, and that is for me a showstopper - so I will not go with it
Arq7
the GUI is really old-fashioned and cumbersome
backup speed was slower than Duplicati, but I did not complete the whole backup
50 USD for one computer or 80 USD for 5 computers, and updates for only one year seemed unattractive for me
might be a good option for someone needing a GUI and having the same trust issues re Duplicati that I have
Restic
no GUI, thus really only for the tech-savvy
backup speed was (surprisingly) slower for me than with Duplicati
thx for your very impressive report! Right now I am using Duplicati with Linux and at least since one year and using the canary version the database rebuild looks fine. I have to try again to restore… I need some other empty machine for that
So yes, without GUI restic may be the way to go. The files are rather small in restic, but not too small…
Have you made some research for other backup programs which could work?
so your experience is that if I had just waited long enough for the Duplicati database rebuild, it would have worked? (But why then not just store a copy of the database in the backup? It just feels wrong!)
No, I have not looked into other solutions so far, as Restic seems to do the job for me. But indeed, some further research might be good. If I come across something, I will certainly let you know.
another option that seems like it could be good for Windows users is Duplicacy. The command-line version is free for personal use, so an expert user could set up the automated backup purely with the CLI version. Then in case of a restore one can use the GUI in the free version, so that would also be possible for less tech-savvy users. From the other features Duplicacy also sounded quite sophisticated with some advantages over restic (lock-less access, compression). But I have not tried it and am quite happy with restic and the scripts I referred to above.
In 2020 there was a comparison between some backup tools in the duplicati forum, which looks quite interesting:
On question from a naive Linux-Only user: is there a way to set up restic on Windows so, that it backups once a week when the windows system is awake, so after a setup phase a normal windoze laptop user could be left allone?
Interesting indeed! It confirms that restic is way slower than Duplicati on the initial backup, which I also noticed. But for incremental backups this then hardly matters, it seems. This is outweighed for me by the issues I have personally seen and read about from many others regarding Duplicati restore when you have lost the database on the computer to be backed up, or corruption of the database has occurred. See also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/nq6zh3/whats_your_experience_with_duplicati_other/
Yes! The windows scripts I mentioned above do just that. They set up a Windows task that is executed once per day (of course can be changed). They take care of pruning the backups in a reasonable way. They also set up proper logs and will send an email if an error occurred (or optionally also if no error occurred). So once set up by a tech-savvy person, I think it should be the perfect backup solution for “normal users”. Just when restoring one will need to go to the command line, but it is at least made easier also with the scripts.
I completely confirm your observations. While trying to fix my setup/database once again and again, I dropped Duplicati in 01/2024. Had “using” ist for aprx. 5 years, with very patience.
Got very much support from the Duplicati community, but while one of the backup jobs got repaired, two other have died - a nightmare. May or not may relate to the aftp plugin, anyway, such trouble is unwelcome in case of urgently needing an older file from backup.
My conclusion:
“Safety over Speed” save the repair and experimental time, spend it to waiting for upload finished.
“Data safety over Data Privacy”. At least in a family scenario. Better my son is able to (theoretically) read my diary while he recovers his master thesis, than to fail the thesis repair in favor of my diary secrecy or the like.
