Duplicacy v/s rclone for immutable data (photos, videos)

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#1

I have duplicacy web setup on my laptop to backup to a local SMB share (which is my NAS server). This backups my entire Mac (documents, files, etc) and then i run copy from NAS to Backblaze B2. That all works fine.

I have a small collection of immutable data (family photos and videos) on my NAS which I would like to start backing up from NAS to Backblaze B2 as well. Initially, i just added a Backup on duplicacy running on my NAS to back the media/photos/videos to Backblaze B2.

But then i started reading about immutable data and how I wouldn’t really benefit from Duplicacy’s deduplication and revision history for photos/videos (since any change to photos/videos would most certainly lead to corruption of the file)

Would I benefit from switching to a simple rclone copy/sync from NAS to Backblaze for my media/photos/videos and only use Duplicacy to backup my macbook? Would I gain much from using Rclone in this scenario if i just want a replica copy of my media on Backblaze?

Or there’s no real benefit of switching to rclone for media/photos/videos and i’m fine backing it up regularly using Backblaze? Probably benefits i see is that if the photos/videos get corrupted on my NAS for some reason, i would be able to recover those files due to duplicacy’s revision history? Don’t see much of a con/anything i’d loose with sticking with Duplicacy in this case.

Any suggestions/advice is much appreciated.

(Just to clarify, i don’t think my media/photos/videos that i want to backup is going to be more than 500-600gigs but it would certainly grow over time)

#2

TLDR: not broken – don’t fix :slight_smile:

mode\opinion pros cons
Media with other data with duplicacy
  1. Simple setup. One interface to manage all data
  2. Duplicate data does not take up space on the target (maybe you copied your vacation pictures to five places and forgot)
    1. Higher performance requirements and waste of energy compressing in-compressible data
    2. Potentially worse performance: huge media files will get shredded into many chunks and result in many more files on the destination, and some remotes are sensitive to latency and/or may charge per segment (like Storj)
    Media Separately over rclone
    1. Simple data management
    2. Data is available plaintext (if needed; rclone also supports encryption) and can be shared with other workflows and accessed by multiple third party tools
    3. Data on the remote is in file granularity which provides much better access performance due fixed per-object latency.
    4. Can immediately benefit from object lock functionality many remotes offer (that duplicacy is yet to support), that is ideal to handle such immutable data
    5. Fewer moving parts – one fewer software layer between you and your data, if you dont’ need to encrypt your files
    1. Another solution to maintain in addition to your main backup
    2 Likes
    #3

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