Clone rather than encrypt

Hello. Is it possible to do copy from one disk to another so that the file structure stays in place for example. All Photos/1996 and the backup on the destination would be All Photos/1996

Thabks.

If you want to create a clone, and not versioned backup that will protect your data from corruption such as bit rot you can use rclone.

Duplicacy is a wrong tool for that: it’s a backup software that keep deduplicated data history in a opaque container and allows you to go back in time to restore your data to the state it was at the moment of backup.

If you do actually want backup then you can’t really have data at the destination as a plaintext (exluding the trivial case of immutable data and -backup flag of rsync and rclone where modified files will be copied to subfolders. Consider that for media files — perhaps it’s exactly what you are lookin for).

Question: why do you want to see files at the destination in the plaintext?

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Hi, thanks for your reply. I’m looking into rclone now. To answer your question I like to see exactly what I’ve got on disk.

With Duplicacy you can use list command to enumerate the the files in any snapshot.

It’s a very vague and arbitrary requirement — “to be able to see what’s on the disk”. You don’t really ever see that; even when you “just copy files” there are only blobs of bits scattered on disk. It’s only when interpreted by the storage controller, partition manager and filesystems driver do they present themselves as files. And if you copy data to different storage provider the arrangement of bits will be different, there will be more layers involved such as network stack, samba, etc —and yet that does not matter. All that matters is that you can reassemble that back into your files.

Duplicacy just adds another layer on top. It’s still blobs scattered on disk and you can use Duplicacy to enumerate and assemble your data back. In fact there were ideas suggested to support VFS to mount the Duplicacy datastore directly, further washing away the difference: Mount duplicacy snapshot as a virtual filesystem

It’s a matter of where do you draw a like. Drawing it at the lowest level filesystem seems very arbitrary: doing so just adds unnecessary limitations and reduces robustness of your solution without giving anything in return. .

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