Thank you all and so long! - At least for now

[C11]

I’ve decided to change my backup scheme and wanted to say thanks and goodbye to the team here.

I have happily used Duplicacy since 2018 and it is a great tool. I’ve used it to backup a PC, two macs, and two NAS volumes to Backblaze B2 that whole time. Luckily, I have never needed to do a restore, outside of a few test files.
My thanks the @gchen and the team, and especially @saspus who always seems to quickly answer questions here!

Why am I leaving? Well, I’m a retired hardware engineer, and while I can deal with some software stuff, it’s always a bit of effort for me. I think Duplicacy works best for people who have strong software / script / command line skills and sometimes I struggle with that stuff. My most significant complaints are about the lack of built in notifications when backups fail. I’ve had several failures where backups stopped and I didn’t notice for months. (Yeah, yeah, I know I could set up notification emails somehow… but that is more software details.) I think the suggested solution for the last problem I had, was to compile my own version of the software with fixes built in. Not as easy for a hardware guy, but possible. If people are more curious about issues I have had they can just search username in the forums.

I’m going to try using Synology’s suite of tools, using the “Drive Client Backup” to backup the household computers to the NAS, and then using “Hyper Backup” to backup the NAS to Synology’s C2 cloud. Their cloud is more expensive than Backblaze B2, but setup is much easier. For me, I think using products all from one vendor will help keep things simpler. Maybe.

Who knows, maybe I’ll be back in a few months. I won’t delete and close my Backblaze B2 account for a while just in case.

Thanks again!
Carl

[saspus]

@C11

I’m going to try using Synology’s suite of tools, using the “Drive Client Backup” to backup the household computers to the NAS, and then using “Hyper Backup” to backup the NAS to Synology’s C2 cloud.

Please please please don’t delete duplicacy backup while you test drive Synology suite of tools. I have nothing to gain and frankly it’s none of my business, but having been duped by eye candy Synology apps in the past, I can’t just sit quietly watching the impeding train wreck. My best advice I can give you now — please stay far, far away from Synology software, especially Drive and HyperBackup, let alone their captive cloud. (You can use any other cloud, including B2, with HyperBackup — but please don’t use those tools in the first place)

I can tell you my whole frustration and futile bug reports filled 3-year long journey through Synology swamp (kudos to their marketing — superb job!) but it would be a long offtopic rant maybe nobody needs to see here

I understand the desire to have user friendly hands-off tool, and Duplicacy has plenty of opportunities to improve UX, but it has benefit of actually working. This cannot be said about any single Synology tool. I don’t remember if I ranted about this on this specific forum — if you are interested I don’t mind sharing again. I can talk about this for hours. I seriously despise that company for the amount of my time they have wasted by sheer incompetence and empty promises. But if you still set on trying their stuff — please don’t delete your duplicacy backup for a few months. And good luck!

@C11

Who knows, maybe I’ll be back in a few months. I won’t delete and close my Backblaze B2 account for a while just in case.

Phew!. I got so worked up reading your previous paragraph that did not see this one coming next. Great :). Hope this worked out.

[phillipmcmahon]

@saspus

You can use any other cloud, including B2, with HyperBackup — but please don’t use those tools in the first place

Could you explain a little more about why those tools should not be used? Whilst I use duplicacy across the board, I know people using said tools and I’d love to understand a little more about the issues you allude to.

[saspus]

@phillipmcmahon

Could you explain a little more about why those tools should not be used?

Stability and reliability. Very briefly: Cloudstation and Drive like to blast very verbose logs that cannot be disabled, literary hundreds of megabytes daily, and inspite of that they like to skip files randomly or stop syncing altogether for no reason. HyperBackup is poorly designed: it keeps data in the inconstistne state during backup and cannot be interrupted; as evidenced by it needing upwards of 15 minutes to cancel an in-progress backup. Network interruptions won’t wait for 15 minutes, and in my testing simulating yanking the cable the datastore was very easy to corrupt.

Generally, avoid any synology software, use disk stations like a baritone fileserver. Unless you have Macs and want to use Time Machine – then don’t use synology altogether. Samba is there always broken and Time Machine bundle will keep getting corrupted. Synology absolutely does not deserve the image their marketing team projects.

[AZERTY]

I totaly agree, Synology softwares are very buggy.

I no longer use any software functions on my Synology, Windows and Linux backups are done via Restic through SAMBA on the primary NAS, and via Duplicacy on the secondary so as not to use the same software for both backups.

Then a Restic copy repo is made through SFTP to external storage.

I had a big crash 3 weeks ago with data loss, via Restic I recovered everything very easily. But Duplicacy allows me to have a spare tire in case of Restic failure.