Backblaze Personal or B2 for Remote Duplicacy Copy?

Support
#1

Hello all - Crashplan refugee here :slight_smile: testing out Duplicacy as hopefully my new solution…

My current planned solution is to use Duplicacy backup for all of our computers (~6) to a Windows 10 VM I’ve created for purposes of holding all of the Duplicacy backups on one local machine. I used Windows as the main repository so that I could have the option of backing up my entire Duplicacy local storage drive using Backblaze Personal (unlimited backups for flat fee).

Most of our machines have really modest usage, but my Windows 10 server is a fileserver with ~70TB of data, portions of which I’d like to push to the cloud over time (I had about 10TB on CrashPlan, which is about the amount I’d like to backup remotely with BB as well).

The main reason for using the personal edition fo Backblaze is that it is a flat cost regardless of size, and since I’m not doing any native / headless backups to Backblaze, I don’t really see a downside to this model.

However, I’m not sure if there are downsides of an essentially manual copy of duplicacy to BackBlaze that I don’t yet understand. For example, given that I’m not using the GUI/CLI to do the copy to Backblaze, will my files backed up there be recoverable? Or would I have to restore the entire remote storage directory structure to allow me to restore a selected group of files locally?

TL;DR – using local + offsite backup copies to BackBlaze, do you get the same functionality of the Duplicacy -copy option using BackBlaze persona edition to copy your entire Duplicay backup structure to BB, or will there be a drawback to this approach?

Thank you!

#2

So you are planning to mirror your local duplicacy backup store to backblaze personal account, if I understand correctly.

Duplicacy store is a collection of files (chunks) with a collection of other files (snapshots referencing the chunks). There is no central locking database that can get out of sync (one of the biggest advantages of Duplicacy compared to competition).

Therefore there should be no technical limitations associated with that approach related to duplicacy (I do that myself with Synology and rsync); however you might hit some unforeseen issues from Backblaze side, simply because nothing unlimited for the fixed price is sustainable and there have to be some limitations in place (throttling upload, and download, similar to what CrashPlan did, is the most common approach to prevent you from uploading too much). (When you pay for storage per GB and for download per GB there is an incentive for the service to let you upload as fast as possible as much as possible and download as fast as possible)

With 10TB of data it may be hard to justify paying for storage per GB (it would be about $40/month with services like Wasabi) but from personal experience (including as a former CrashPlan user) I would never even consider using something that has “unlimited” in the name.

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#3

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes you understood correctly.

I’m a little skeptical of the “unlimited” for free as well, so I might end up using B2 either way, but just so I understand you correctly, if my mirrored copy of my Duplicacy storage is at Backblaze Personal, how would I restore a single file from their cloud storage that is missing on my local backups (or in the case I lose all my local backups)?

Would I have to first download the entire storage backup from BackBlaze to get all the chunks to my local system to be able to run a CLI against it?

And is this any different whether I use B2 or the personal edition? i.e. you always have to have the whole system locally to be able to run a CLI against it?

From what I understand so far, I think this is the key point in choosing Personal vs. B2 (i.e. usability with a personal backup that isn’t integrated to the CLI would be a PITA in the case of a restore, whereas if you use B2, you can run commands against the remote location just as you do locally without having the entire thing local to you). However, I’m not sure I understand it correctly yet, so clarification here would be much appreciated.

Thanks again for the response!

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#4

Yes, that would be the main disadvantage of using this unsupported approach.

If you absolutely needed to restore just one file without syncing the whole thing first you could technically download only small snapshot folders, and then try to restore that file. Restore command will naturally complain about missing chunks, you would then download every missing chunk file it complained about and retry. Eventually after few iterations you would restore your file. This maybe OK to do with a few files but it’s a pain to do and it is too much work for nothing. it would be much easier to just Sync the whole thing locally first.

On the other hand for just $/5 month that may be OK as a backup plan for your backup plan :slight_smile:

And is this any different whether I use B2 or the personal edition? i.e. you always have to have the whole system locally to be able to run a CLI against it?

Duplicacy supports B2 as a backend destination directly and will work directly on it, without need for a local copy. In fact you can add more than one destination and backup to all of them, or copy between destinations, etc. It’s pretty flexible.

From what I understand so far, I think this is the key point in choosing Personal vs. B2 (i.e. usability with a personal backup that isn’t integrated to the CLI would be a PITA in the case of a restore, whereas if you use B2, you can run commands against the remote location just as you do locally without having the entire thing local to you). However, I’m not sure I understand it correctly yet, so clarification here would be much appreciated.

Yep! you have understood and formulated this perfectly!

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#5

Awesome, thanks so much for confirming @saspus. I think what I’m going to do as a starting point is just use B2 for my ‘essentials’ for the family (home videos, pictures, documents, etc.), and if I later decide I want to push the rest of the stuff (multiple TBs…) then I’ll add a personal BackBlaze account just for that and keep it separate.

This way I have the easy integration with B2 for if I really need it for something important (and given that all that is probably < 1TB anyhow, it’ll save me a bit of money in the beginning.

Thanks again for helping me to sort this out so quickly!

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#6

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