Wow this is crazy. This is SO NOT intuitive. Plus it doesn’t work right.
If you try to create a new respository in your example just to be able to restore to a different directory it fails with the following:
Failed to download the configuration file from the storage: The storage is likely to have been initialized with a password before
You really need to consider a “restore to option”. I’m sorry but this is absolutely crazy 
This error has nothing to do with usability, or restoring to a different location - either your password is wrong, or you’re doing something else wrong which results in this error, such as not supplying or enabling an encryption password.
In most cases this should be
duplicacy init backup1 sftp://user@192.168.1.100/path/to/storage -e
^^^^
Took me half an hour to figure out why it wasn’t working. Maybe for people working with duplicacy every day it is obvious that you need to tell duplicacy to encrypt the storage, but for the average user?
Quick suggestion: when the user tries to initialize an encrypted storage without the -e option, instead of just saying
Failed to download the configuration file from the storage: The storage is likely to have been initialized with a password before
say:
Failed to download the configuration file from the storage: The storage is likely to have been initialized with a password before. In that case, use the -e option.
Or even better: just assume -e and ask for the bl@#%y password!
Sorry to necropost but I am feeling the exact same way right now. This is terrible design.
Trying out Duplicacy CLI for the first time right now and… Great software but a nightmare for usability so far. Documentation very lacking.