Is there a way to install Duplicacy on Android? I have this idea of syncing some of my files to a 1TB SD Card on my phone and then backup using Duplicacy on remote storage. Figured out my phone is the one device that is always on and connected and would like to try that and see how it goes.
Does anyone have any concerns about that use case, if I manage to have Duplicacy on my phone?
Memory requirements and battery use would be concern. But otherwise it shall work. Try Linux arm64 binary, depending on your system architecture. Or you can always build from source.
Thanks. I was meaning to learn this “building from source” thing, I guess now the time has come. How much phone memory would I need for this to work?
Depends on the number of files that need to be backed up. The easiest would be to try and see if it works for your setup.
Okay, thank you very much. On Windows Duplicacy barely uses anything (less than 100MB). As for the battery concern, I was thinking of using an older phone that can be permanently on charger.
Actually everything started with the idea of a device that is permanently online with a backup connection (LAN/WiFi+4G/5G), that has a battery in case the power is out, enough storage, is low-powered (less that 10-15W), has sufficient RAM/CPU power, plus a way to manage it - to be my backup hub.
Initially I was looking into mini-PC, Raspberry Pi, NAS, so on… until I realized that what I actually need is a phone with a big SD card. My data from PC and actual phone can be synced with Syncthing to that phone and then it can also backup everything to the cloud with Duplicacy. So I have to create a Duplicacy APK and see how well it works.
Thank you both subs and saspus (didn’t use the tag as I wasn’t sure if it was warranted or frowned upon)!
I remember looking for android version of duplicacy a while back and gave up because I didn’t see any. Your posts and the reminder that it’s basically a Linux arm device made me start trying to run it.
Rabbit hole deepened quite rapidly as I couldn’t set the binary to run at least without root on my vanilla OS but yesterday I got the binary working…backing up to local storage. Apparently something different about DNS resolving. So I had to build the CLI binary for Android which I had never done. Now it works, it seems, good enough for my needs. I just want to back up my stuff wherever and whenever if I’m not on my home network. It worked at least on my 6 GB device backing up my photos.
It has quite a few caveats and needs some work in the future but for now I’ll just run it manually. If you can get an APK done and running natively I would be quite interested though.
If you can’t get it done and anyone wants I can do a small writeup but as a warning it’s a bit laborious (at least felt like it when I had to learn while doing) and you’ll habe to be somewhat comfortable using command line.
Honestly, I’d sooner use a more lightweight alternative that simply sync’s off your photos to another device (I use Syncthing, which works quite well), or a tool like Immich if you have a small NAS or server of some kind - and then from there, use Duplicacy to backup that device.
Mainly coz of RAM requirements, but also do you really wanna churn CPU cycles on a mobile for high level compression and encryption? Batteries in these things already wear down too soon enough…
Thanks for the suggestions! Immich was a new one for me and I have a passing familiarity with Syncthing. I’ll admit not being a biggest fan of sync solutions (at least 2-way) but I see some options could alleviate that.
I did this for my thinking of “easy solution” just adding a new id to my existing backups that I can launch occasionally if I’m not home and have added something I want to backup. It may not always match the chunking from my main backup but the amount of data won’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
You’re right about it probably is an overkill (at least for my poor phone 
) but I thought it to be okay for occasional updates. Will definitely read more on the suggestions though! Oh well, at least I learned something interesting if I abandon it.