General Questions about Duplicacy Web UI running in Docker

Support
#1

Hi team,

Thanks for putting together this amazing project. I just tried with my trial license, I used the Web-GI version. I do plan to purchase the license to support the project. But I have a few questions, I was searching around the form, but I couldn’t find much similar use case (maybe i wasn’t doing a good job gathering the information, but thanks in advance) I’m kinda new to this topic, excuse me if the questions are silly.

  1. I installed the duplicacy with web-ui in a docker container, so i assume when i try to run “duplicacy” cli, it won’t automatically work on my host machine. But I wasn’t sure why it also doesn’t work when I try to run it inside my duplicacy web-ui container, am I missing something?

  2. I’m trying to understand if I set up a remote backup with SFTP to a remote machine. And in the worst case, my duplicacy docker host machine completely dies, I get a new machine and install docker with duplicacy web-ui container again. Can I do a full recovery in the web-UI?
    (I’m assuming once i set up the storage, it will automatically recognize my existing storage?)

  3. I’m kinda new to this topic, if I want to enable using the duplicacy CLI, do I need to install something additionally?

  4. Lastly, i see some posts mentioned the License is bind to your host name + machine ID, i guess even if I use container to install duplicacy. As long as I don’t change to a new host, i can reinstall many times I want as long as I keep using the same host machine?

Thank you so much!

#2

Depending on your host OS you may want to run it directly, natively, without docker. Duplicacy does not have any dependencies, so docker does not provide much value from the isolation perspective.

  1. WebUI uses CLI engine to do all the work, and it creates temporary repositories to run CLI in. They are located under ~/.duplicacy_web/repositories" folder. You can run duplciacy CLI engine from a corresponding subfolder inside that folder if you have to, but that would defeat the point of having web UI. Might as well run duplicacy CLI and schedule it with OS scheduler.
  2. Yes. The process is exactly the same as if you are configuring new storage. Duplicacy will seee that the storage already contain existing backup and will “adopt” it. You need to save credentials for a storage server, and duplciacy encryption password (if used), but you don’t need anything else to restore and/or continue backup.
  3. You can just download the CLI version from gihub and use it directly. It’s free for personal use.
  4. Container persists machine id in the /config/machine-id file, so that as long as the configuration folder persists, and the container hostname is the same, duplicacy in the container will think it’s running on the same machine. You can reinstall duplicacy Web on as many machines as you want, run chess, prunes, etc, but in order to do backup you need a license. License can be activated on one host. If you move installation to another host – you need to change the hostname in your duplciacy.com account, and feed the activation code to the duplicacy-web running on the new host.