Readthedocs.io - a great way to provide documentation

[Derek_v2]

Preface: this is not a whinge. It’s a comparison.

A couple of years ago i started looking at automated backup solution for my Linux and Windows boxes. I started with Duplicati, but that didn’t work out very well - though it is amazingly well featured and pretty easy to set up. Then i came here - but i struggled with finding answers to questions i didn’t know i had because they’re scattered all over the forum. I see that’s improved a lot with the green guide button.

I looked at Borg and found their documentation to be amazing - so i chose that for Linux to get moving and stop procrastinating. I learnt so much about backups just by reading the Borg doco.
Borg Docs:
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/master/index.html

Restic has similarly excellent documentation:
https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I’m still relying on Robocopy for Windows.

readthedocs seems like a really great way to organise and present doco. Is there any plan to invest the time and effort into it or something like it?

As well as that, areas in the GUI that offer commands or global thingies would be much easier if they linked to where this information is. Better still would be drop-down selections of the most commonly used ones (i’ve suggested that before).

Thanks.

p.s. i have zero affiliation with Borg, Restic or Readthedocs.io - despite my pimping

EDIT: It would be remiss of me, however, to overlook how great the community is in this forum. Borg has no forum!

So thanks to everyone here

[Droolio]

I was gonna to recommend this very thing.

More specifically: Sphinx and reStructuredText (the markup syntax) - which I believe are the tools readtheddocs .io uses. AFAICT, they’re really only a free docs hosting platform. You can host it yourself, so Duplicacy could have its own docs.duplicacy.com site if @gchen wanted.

For example, Syncthing has its own docs site, seemingly built by Sphinx (like many many sites you may’ve come across but didn’t realise), but the .rst markup editable on Github - so people can fork and make pull requests etc.

From a practical point, it’d be relatively easy to convert the existing Discourse forum markup (which I believe is commonmark) to rst.

Only yesterday did I point someone on Reddit to where the CLI guide was. They were about to give up on Duplicacy due to not being able to find adequate documentation for it. While Discourse is great forum software, and the current docs have been well-curated and looked after, I think a dedicated docs site - for both CLI and GUI - would propel Duplicacy adoption even more.

[gchen]

I agree such a doc site will look much better. I added it to Roadmap for the CLI.