Please: the notice and backup failure notices should be more prominant

UX
#1

Suggestion follows:
OK, so this is the second time that I miss the renewal date and things go without backup for a week or so.
It would be really cool if the top of the main dashboard page posted a big Failed Backup / EXPIRED notice, and a clear link to the renewal page.
And then I renewed and stuff didn’t start working until I finally found the “expired” link that brought me to where I had to enter the key. That could be more obvious too.

Generally, I think failed backups warrant a much bigger notice right at the top of the dashboard page. I don’t think users should have to scroll down and notice that no new revisions have been happening. I might notice that, but my wife never will…
PS: I renewed for 3 years… I figure if nothing changes I will have forgotten all this and miss it again if there is no change… :rofl:

Adding a new second computer backup to an existing storage?
#2

This would be half measure. Backup can fail for multiple reasons, and expired license is not even the most common scenarios.

Nobody will see prominent message in the UI because nobody will think to open it. Better approach would be if app shows an annoying popup, but even that is pretty useless — app may fail to start in the first place.

Instead what will work is some mechanism that notifies you when backup hasn’t occurred for some time.

And this already works today: point backup task to healthchecks.io and configure notifications.

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#3

On my installations, the default is that the app opens the browser when the system boots.
Isn’t this the default on everything using the GUI?
So everyone who reboots would see the message!
I mean… do something… even if it doesn’t cover all the possibilities, some attempt to make it clearer to the user is better than no attempt at all.

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#4

I agree with this: Duplicacy should be able to send OS notifications – every OS has Notification Center today. Or even push notifications in the browser, it being web app and all – it could have utilized its webiness.

But I disagree with the rest. Namely:

This is horrible choice: Duplicacy is a backup program that must quietly do it’s job unless somethign horrific happens that it can’t handle on its own: only then shall it gently notify the user. Gently!. Blasting a browser window, uninvited, by default, on startup, right into user’s face, in light mode when everything else is dark, is inconsiderate, invasive, and counterproductive. I’ve just booted my machine _to do something, why is the app deciding for me what’s important? It’s one of the very important principles of user experience design that also applies to invasive popup ads: no windows shall be open other than in response to direct user’s action. Booting the machine does not quality as that action.

Fortunately, there is a command line option to prevent that. But really, it shoudl be the default.

However, even with that, see the next point:

How often do you reboot? Most people don’t ever reboot, (or are present when reboot occurs) – looking at my Mac I’m typing this on:

me@obsidian ~ % uptime
23:42  up 122 days, 11:26, 6 users, load averages: 2.83 2.16 2.15

4+ month. It’s pretty much never, when the backup frequency is concerned.

So, while I agree, that something may be better than nothing – and Notifications via establish OS mechanisms would be welcomed feature – ultimately, this only covers only a small subset of possible failure modes: service cannot monitor its own heath, you need external service for that. And for that – external web apps like healthcheck are exactly what we need. Duplicacy.com could have implemented their own version of it – but there won’t be much value, and limited development resources will likely be better spent elsewhere: healthchecks.io today fully serves the purpose of non-invasively notifying the user about missed backup regardless of the reason.

Does it make sense?

#5

Just shows how different everyone is…
I have all “notifications” on both the mac/pc and browser blocked.
And we shut down every machine every night.
I searched for stats on computer shutdowns and what I found led me to believe about half of users or more shutdown every night.

At any rate… regardless of your thoughts on notifications and autolaunching browsers…
Duplicacy’s web UI launches to a dashboard… And it seems to me this stuff should be prominent at the top of that dashboard, so whenever the user choosers to look at it it is obvious that backups are failing. Why hide the failing backups on the “dashboard”?

#6

Oh, and on healthchecks.io and similar… if you are an IT pro, OK… but what about the normal people? Again, there is no good reason to hide failing backups as tiny red lines that you have to scroll down to notice at the bottom of the dashboard. Give us a big warning please!

#7

Not arguing with this at all. Duplicacy should implement notifications.

In fact, it has your email address, and therefore should be able to email you, using duplicacy maintained mail relay. Because asking users to specify their own smtp credentials is too much to ask as well.

In any way, we shall ask for a proper solution, not a stop-gap measure that only marginally improves some scenarios.

#8

Exactly how does one “point backup task to” a healthchecks URL???

#9

Yes. No doubt about that. This is UX design issue and WebUI UX design is horrible.

However implementing just what you ask and calling it a day would be counterproductive, because it will only benefit users who 1) reboot daily (why?!) 2) allow duplicacy open browser on start (why?!!). It won’t work for users like me, who do none of those things.

Solution that only fixes issue for some users is incomplete at best.

In other words: shall duplicacy prominently display failures in the UI? YES.

Is this enough to fix communication of failure to the user? NO.

Therefore, let’s not ask for just this one-sided fix, but instead for overhaul the the whole UX experience around backup failure. This will involve mail, notifications, etc. because why waste developer time?

On browser and otherwise notifications: I used to disable all of notifications everywhere, just like you — I don’t like distractions and interruptions. But now OS allow to mute them en-masse. So they now don’t interrupt me and I can review them later on my own time. So, I have re-enabled notifications for apps I care about, like backup, SMS, calendar, webex, etc. if duplicacy supported notifications (about failed backup only! I don’t want to hear about successes!) they will also get enabled, and reviewed. As opposed to something in UI that I won’t even use after initial configuration, ideally ever.

#10

Not really relevant to the conversation, but since you asked:
It’s not so much “reboot daily”, as “turn off every night”. Why:

  • habit and SSDs boot fast
  • maximum security
  • power usage
  • why not? Doesn’t seem to slow me down. :wink:
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#11

Interesting! Here is my “why not”:

  1. Reboot purges memory caches — power and performance impact.
  2. When machine is shut down it does not wake periodically to fetch updates (photos, calendars, mail) and does not back them up offsite (Power Nap)
  3. Wake from sleep is instant, and desktop ccan be unlocked with Apple Watch or TouchID.
  4. Booting from shut down on the other hand requires manual password entry to decrypt disk and prime biometrics; in addition the boot process is much longer (tens of second vs half a second) compared to wake from sleep.
  5. Power consumption in sleep is negligible ( half a watt to a few watts; not much different than 0 compared to power-on).
  6. When you shut down all users are logged off, meaning their content updates and backup also stops, so you’ll have to log in with them again.
  7. You can access sleeping machine any time if need be. Powered off is dead for all uses.

So there is that :slight_smile:

I think it’s relevant, because this is a usecase that exemplifies a (what I consider very common) usecase, and to illustrate that software should not be relying on “just started” condition to do anything important; that condition can be very rare. The only reason I rebooted my Mac few months ago was software update. If not that — uptime would have been much higher.