Such a sadly immature response.
“not worth paying for” (in your opinion) does not equal “scam”. You must know this.
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I’m not sure I’d go as far as to claim Duplicacy is a scam, but I really am starting to wonder what our money is going towards when we pay for the GUI? I am a big supporter of duplicacy, have used and recommended it for years, installed it on parent’s machines, and paid for multiple licences (finally remembered to set a reminder to get a lifetime last black friday!).
However, after reading so many accounts of kopia over the years, and hearing about it again when mentioned on a podcast recently, I finally decided to give it a whirl to see what all the fuss is about.
And, my word, the night-and-day, worlds-apart difference in the UI’s between kopia and duplicacy is almost unreal. Yes, as @saspus says, perhaps that comes at a resource cost if you are running KopiaUI as it is an electron app, but I would argue on modern laptops I cannot notice the resource use at all. What I do notice is the far higher comprehensibility and ease-of-use of the gui.
What’s more, you don’t even need the KopiaUI application to access kopia’s gui, as you can access the web-server gui when you run the cli binary in server mode, which it comes bundled with at no extra cost. In server mode it can also act as a proxy server for remote storage repos, enabling a far more intuitive multi-user use of the same storage repository, with users unable to view or restore files from other users’ snapshots even when stored in the same storage repo (something you can’t achieve on duplicacy as I understand it - even with rsa encryption per snapshot, the filename and metadata is viewable by all users of the same repo).
All I can say is that, whilst I still think duplicacy is great, and will likely continue to use it, I am starting to feel a bit disillusioned with it – or at least, the fact the gui has had no updates in such a long time, despite that ostensibly being the thing we are paying for when we buy a licence.
Duplicacy’s usability is really not intuitive at all, and the gui is, to me, a mess. Everything is spread out in such a confusing way. Even after years of use, every time I need to interact with duplicacy I still have to always return to the forums and search for how to do or achieve certain things, even really basic stuff when restoring (such as “oh, what’s the command for entering the rsa keyphrase again?”).
There are no ‘?’ info boxes in the gui explaining what a thing is or does (what is the difference between an Encryption Password and Administration Password? Why is that difference not explained within the ui?), no presentation of features that you could enable with a tick box if required, or an easy and intuitive way to change certain properties. If you want to do something you have to remember / look-up the commands to enter into this one little textbox (such that you can’t even read the entire command if it’s longer than the box by keying through it one letter at a time). No easy way to select and delete a specific snapshot. Missing features form the prune command. I could go on.
It just subjectively appears to me quite obvious that duplicacy web gui is a non-ui-focussed dev’s attempt at slapping a ui wrapper on a (great!) underlying cli binary, and forgetting what it’s like to be a novice unfamiliar with the intricacies of the command line, or even someone who is comfortable on the cli but just likes to have graphical overview of their backups.
Even though kopia is essentially doing the same thing under the hood with its gui basically a wrapper for the cli binary, it just feels so much more of a gui app. Whereas with duplicacy you always feel like you are just interacting with the cli through this cluttered and disorganised messy interface, kopia’s ui is so much more intuitive, and despite being a complete beginner to kopia 24 hours ago, I already feel like I have a really good grasp of its concepts, and can use it so much more easily than I ever have been able to use duplicacy.
I love duplicacy. I cannot yet trust kopia to be my sole backup, so will run them in parallel for now. I will continue to use duplicacy and support it, and will most likely be buying another lifetime licence next black friday. But I must say, seeing what else is out there really has made me a tad disillusioned with duplicacy and most especially with the lack of development on the ui front.
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