Newbie: Recommended usage of --repository and --pref-dir

[ssshayagriva]

Hi All,

I’m a newbie to duplicacy, and I’m in the phase of testing it out for my cloud backups. I’m planning to use the wasabi backend since they allow a free 1-month 1TB trial.

I tried reading through a couple of forum topics such as:

Alternative location for .duplicacy directory?

Hello , I’m slowly designing my new backup system based on duplicacy. Context: All my data are stored on my QNAP NAS. (home folders, Shared folders) I plan to use Onedrive as remote storage. Quite a few directories are synched on mas NAS and on my mac desktops thanks to syncthing. I Heavily rely on Docker for deploying additional capabilities on my NAS. I do not want the .duplicacy directory being replicated on all the partners computers of synching Moreover I’d like the container having on…

"repository" init and add options

I kind of fixed my entry at the github as, thinking/writing here about it, makes it clear that it would still make much sense to add -filters as an option as well as a preferences entry as it “unifies” everything required for a single backup set.

but I’m not sure I get the big picture view. I’m trying to accomplish what others in the posts are: keep my repository directories free from any duplicacy metadata like .duplicacy folder, preferences files etc. I believe the recommended way is to use a different folder for the .duplicacy/preferences setup and then use the --repository flag during init to point to the repository directory, correct? And this would keep my repository pristine clean without any metadata?

If the above is correct, how would I manage the preferences for various different repositories? Apologies if this is already answered, but from the long forum discussions, it’s sometimes difficult get to the summary.

Thanks for your help, and thanks for releasing the CLI version free for personal use!

[towerbr]

I believe the recommended way is to use a different folder for the .duplicacy/preferences setup and then use the --repository flag during init to point to the repository directory, correct? And this would keep my repository pristine clean without any metadata?

Yes. Yes.

If the above is correct, how would I manage the preferences for various different repositories?

You will have to use a folder (or sub folder) for each setting. I use something like this:

duplicacy_prefs/
├── repo1/
│   └── .duplicacy
│       ├── filters
│       ├── keyring
│       └── preferences
├── repo2/
│   └── .duplicacy
│       ├── filters
│       ├── keyring
│       └── preferences
├── repo3/
...

Just remember that folders like cache and logs will also stay in this folder. I clean the cache regularly with a script.

Take a look:

Cache folder is is extremely big!

When you prune any of the repositories, still needs to download all existing snapshot files for all repositories (not the whole data, just the chunks which store each revision details – the meta chunks). The /cache/chunks/ folder is used to store only these meta chunks that make up the snapshots. If there are very many revisions or if some repositories contain large number of files, then the /cache/chunks/ folder can grow to a surprisingly large size, reaching even more than 150GB. This is…