General questions (best practices)

[jotteerr]

Hi all,

I’m just evaluating Duplicacy with the web GUI. The basic procedures are working, but I need a little help with a good backup strategy. My main storage for hourly backups of my MacBook Pro is a Mac mini in my local network with several external hard drives. Does it make sense to check the storage after each backup? And for making a aditiional copy of the storage on one external hard drive to another one connected to the Mac mini, do I have to install Duplicacy on the mini, too?

The MacBook’s SSD is APFS formatted (as are the external hard drives with the storage), should I go with the -vss option for the hourly backups?

And how often do you people prune old snapshots? The hard drive containing the storage has 5 TB, my MacBook has a 500 GB hard drive, an additional MacBook with 500 MB will share this space for backups. Are the default values for pruning meaningful?

Best
Joachim

[TheBestPessimist]

Does it make sense to check the storage after each backup?

No. Once a week, maybe once a month.

And for making a aditiional copy of the storage on one external hard drive to another one connected to the Mac mini, do I have to install Duplicacy on the mini, too?

You can run the copy command straight from the MacBook Pro.

should I go with the -vss option for the hourly backups?

Try it and see. If there aren’t any errors, or if programs don’t misbehave, then you can use it without worries. I expect you won’t have issues, but i know that on windows microsoft’s own outlook doesn’t work properly, that’s why i’m warning you.

And how often do you people prune old snapshots

I do it once a week, but i guess you can totally go once a month (in the second case prune will take longer though since it has more data to go through).

Another interesting thread about pruning: Prune Default ID and other Prune Questions