Also can't recommend duplicati. I never got it to work despite sinking many hours into it using different storage options. Not even local disk worked.

Instead, I'd recommend Arq backup.

I have had similar experiences. I could not get a non-corrupt backup from one machine; it would repeatedly ask me to regenerate the local database from remote, which never succeeded. Oddly, another machine never seemed to have an issue, but that's not an argument in favor of using the software. It is possible there are "safe" versions, but without a way to identify them (all the releases I used were linked from the homepage).

I had a similar experience with Duplicati. I attempted a 2TB backup of my NAS to a cloud storage and it went up to ~500GB and would just hang there.

I switched to restic and recomned it over Duplicati.

Just another stat point... Been using it against 1TB storing encrypted to Backblaze B2 for about a year and a half. I've tested restoring and so far it's been very stable.

Just to balance this. I use duplicati for both my web server where I host client websites, and my personal home nas.

I've had to use it to restore multiple times, and have never had an issue with it. It's saved my ass multiple times. It's always been a set it and forget it until I remember I need it.

Never tried Duplicati, but restic + B2 has been great as "a different choice", and for my use case of backing up a variety of OS's (Windows, Mac, and different Linux distros, anyway), it's worked great.

I'll throw a +1 in for Duplicacy too. I think I'm backing up something like 8TB to Wasabi using it and it's excellent in terms of de-duplication.

I had a very similar experience with Duplicati on a small (disk space wise) backup set but a very large number of files bloating the sqlite data store.

I use Urbackup to back up Windows and Linux hosts to a server on my home network and then use Borg to back that up for DR. I'm currently in the process of testing Restic now that it has compression and may switch Borg out for that.

How strange. I have been backing up my own computers (4) and those of my family (another 3) using Duplicati for over three years now, and aside from the very rare full-body derp that required a complete dump of the backup profile (once) and a rebuild of the remote backup (twice), it’s been working flawlessly. I do test restores of randomly chosen files at least once a year, and have never had an issue.

Granted, the backup itself errors out on in-use files (and just proceeds to the next file), but show me a backup program that doesn’t. Open file handles make backing up rather hard for anything that needs to obey the underlying operating system.

I started to use Duplicati 2 for about a month now to try it out, and it was working flawlessly for me, except for occasional time-out of the web UI. I only backup local directories, and the destinations I tried out include an external drive over USB, Google Drive, and an SSH connection.

I'm using it to backup a Firefox profile while I'm using Firefox. It backed up active files as they are being written too! I'm also using it to backup a Veracrypt container file (single 24GB file), and incremental backups worked quite well too.

Thanks for the words of advice, I will keep testing longer before I make the switch.

Agree duplicati is quite immature.

I've looked around quite a bit too but did you actually use restic and duplicacy?

They've eaten my RAM quite heavily, it caused the machine to freeze up by exhausting the RAM on not that huge data sets and I've stopped using them a year or so ago.

I've come to the conclusion to use Borg and zfs as backup solutions (better to run multiple reliable independent implementations), latter being quite fast by knowing what got changed on each incremental backups as a file system itself unlike any other utilities that need to scan the entire datasets to figure out what got changed since last run.

You can run a 1GB memory instance and plug HDD (far cheaper) based block storage (such as on Vultr or AWS) for cheap zfs remote target. Ubuntu gets zfs running easily by simply installing zfsutils-linux package.

If you need large space, rsync.net gives you zfs target with $0.015/GB but with 4TB minimum commitment. Also good target for Borg at same price but with 100GB minimum yearly commitment. Hetzner storage box and BorgBase seem good for that too.

If you use restic/kopia, how are you managing scheduling and failure/success reporting together?

That's one thing I can't seem to quite figure out with those solutions. I know there are scripts out there (or I could try my own), but that seems error-prone and could result in failed backups.

  restic [...] && curl <heartbeat-url>

I read that Duplicati is also in beta (for years now), and that really seems discouraging. Restic looks great, but it's also 0.14 as of the moment. Would you consider restic a stable product, despite the version number?

Even late this warning has to be issued: restic still has serious problems with writing to samba shares - to the honor of the auhors we can see that the manual clearly tells you about that:

On Linux, storing the backup repository on a CIFS (SMB) share is not recommended due to compatibility issues.

There seems to be some deeper system level problem with go concurrency:

https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2659

I agree. I really liked the interface and gave it a go at least 3 or 4 times, and got burned every single time with errors or random issues.

Duplicacy seems to upload every chunk as a separate object/file, which is great for deduplication but bad for your cloud bill (S3 providers usually charge for PUT requests). There's a reason everybody else packs up chunks.

I had a mixed experience. I've been able to successfully restore backups (the most important thing), but I frequently had to fix database issues, which makes the backup less seamless (perhaps the second most important thing).

Duplicacy has worked well for several years on both my wife's and mother's laptops. Doesn't require much work and just keeps operating.

Adding to the choir. I like the web UI of Duplicati but found it buggy and unstable, which are definitely not things you want in a backup system.

In my experience, Duplicacy is most stable backup software compared to Dupli* family. I don't say it's rock solid but mostly it works.

Agree totally with this. It's a hot mess tbh and very unreliable. As suggested restic (with autorestic as a wrapper) is a great replacement.

It's hard to see restic as a Duplicati replacement when there's no official documentation about backing data via SFTP on Windows.

I too had huge problems with Duplicati restoring. Switched to Borg, using Vorta as the GUI and am much happier.

I did use it. It worked 90% of the time. I backed up to one-drive. I just ended up getting veeam.

I had a terrible experience too. The UI is incredibly slow and personally, I had issues where the "local db" had to be constantly repaired. The tool is just buggy and doesn't work well IMO.

FWIW: I ran it on 3 separate Windows PCs for around 6 months without any real luck getting it to work consistently.

"Is OVH cloud archive the cheapest cloud storage for backups in europe? It lets me use scp or rsync, among others."

OVH may, indeed, be the cheapest.

If you email[1] and ask for the long-standing "HN Reader Discount" you can get $0.01/GB storage and free usage/bandwidth/transfer.

Zurich Equinix ZH4 on init7 pipes.

Depending on your preference either [2] or [3] may be the most compelling aspect of our service.

[1] info@rsync.net

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26960204

[3] https://www.rsync.net/products/universal.html

It's pretty hard to beat Hetzner Storage Boxes, if you can live with the fixed provisioning (beyond being able to switch between the tiers).

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Far from it really.

Backblaze is much cheaper, and can have free egress when using Cloudflare with it.

There is also Storj, a decentralized storage coin and it gives 150 GB for free + $4/TB with free egress matching what you stored.

another one is IDrive E2, it $4/tb, with the first year costing the same as a single month, with egress for free up to about three times the size of what's stored.

Hetzners storage boxes are pretty cheap, but that is for a reason.

The upload speed is pretty slow outside Hetzners network (from my experience) and more importantly is that data is only protected by a single RAID cluster.

They also offer free Unlimited egress.

But I would personally go with Backblaze or maybe IDrive.

Or a small computer with a disk at a friend's home and backup to that. It's cheaper than cloud after one or two years, always less reliable, network speed is probably OK, you can have physical access. If the friend is a techy it could be one among many other little computers in that home. You can reciprocate by hosting his/her backup at your home.

Cheap and dirty: Office 365 family plan with 6 account a 1TB each for around $60/year.

Have you tested restores? The problem I had with duplicati was that eventually restoring from a backup would take exponentially longer, to the point of never finishing. Maybe it would have eventually, but I can't wait multiple days to restore one file. There's a possibility it was an error or problem on my end, and this was a couple of years ago, so ymmv.

> running without issue (AFAIK ^^)

If you don't know, then it's not working. At least that should be your stance on backups.

Duplicacy has been incredibly stable for me over the years and I still prefer it's lock-free deduplication design. Looks like 28 days ago there was a major release as well. Time to upgrade. :)

https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy

They have some major differences. Enough so that I first tried Duplicati and ran into corruption issues so frequently that I sought out an alternative and luckily found Duplicacy.

Duplicacy has been stable for years now and I gladly pay the commercial license. It seemed like Duplicacy constructs a giant DB of all the files and manages everything that way, whereas Duplicacy's approach is much simpler and is less prone to corruption. The large DB approach seems to fail when the backup set contains a large number of files that many users manage.

I occasionally use restic but one thing I don't like about it is the sheer number of data files it creates (45k for ~800GB in my case) which makes it a pain to use with certain cloud storage providers that don't always handle tens of thousands of files very well (gdrive being a good example).

Is there some way to get it to not make as many files?

I've used restic with the backblaze and S3 backends - works pretty well for me. The newest version also has compression on top of deduplication, like borg, which is nice. (Of course, it will only make a difference for compressible data - most images or videos won't compress, but say, JSONs will).

Same. Database corruption hit me after ~1.5 years and I could never figure out what the cause was or how to fix it. Which is a shame, because Duplicati looks like a great open source project with a lot of dev time and effort invested into it. But when it comes to backup software, your core functionality better work reliably, and Duplicati just isn't there. I since switched to Duplicacy and couldn't be happier.

Thanks for the note!