now I am finding the time to finally migrate to Windows 10, a lot of work to do, maaaany applications to be installed and reconfigured again.
Is there a way I can easily Migrate Duplicacy to the new Windows? If there’s no registry stuff, my preferred way to do it is copying application settings as in “%appdata%”, or whereever applications store their data, from the old storage device to the new one. Paths are all the same.
I installed Duplicacy-web via installer and copied the following, before first run:
%userprofile%.duplicacy-web\
%localappdata%\DuplicacyWebEdition\
Anything else I can do? I then started Duplicacy - but the web interface says “Please enter the password to encrypt/decrypt the passwords/credentials stored in the configuration file.”
Well I can’t remember what kind of Password that was supposed to be… I’ve stored a password and a license key in my pw db, but does not seem to be related. “Failed to decrypt the testing data using the supplied password: cipher: message authentication failed”
TIA
Hmm, IDK. It does not want that password in my pw safe. Transport a new installation probably not possible because Dup uses Windows “Data Protection API”.
Aww, it’s sad. Looks like it’s like I’m used to when it comes to backup software. Build anything from scratch, all the many backup tasks, this will be the way, maybe a restore will be possible, but I’m used to having to upload all my TBs again and will be at the state where I was before, …when it’s done and uploaded … when I find time… in half a year or so.
Now over to Duplicati. As expected, it also does not want to operate simply.
Did you copy the .duplicacy-web folder to the same place on the new PC before running it? You should make sure Duplicacy isn’t running when you do that.
The first password is just to encrypt the data stored in the Web Edition’s .json settings. You can make a new one up if you need to start from scratch, but it’s really quite easy to add back the storage and backup locations. If it’s a new PC, those locations will probably have changed anyway.
Hopefully, the ‘storage password’ is the one you have stashed away in your password manager.
Hi, yes of course, I have kept all usernames and paths the same from Win7 to Win10, which usually makes life easy, but not here. I have made the old C: accessible via c:\Disk\Windows_OLD\ and can copy all the nice stuff over to the new one. But this is not enough for Duplicacy.
So the steps were:
Install Duplicacy (only for user, do not run it afterwards), then
Old Windows:
c:\Disk\Windows_OLD\Users\Michel.duplicacy-web
c:\Disk\Windows_OLD\Users\Michel\AppData\Local\DuplicacyWebEdition\
copied it to new Windows:
c:\Users\Michel.duplicacy-web
c:\Users\Michel\AppData\Local\DuplicacyWebEdition\
Start Duplicacy
#FAIL
EDIT: Uninstalled and re-Tried all above steps. Same problem. It cannot be transported this way. Unfortunately tried all my passwords, plus the stored in PW manager, plus the one which is stored in Chrome (it has stored a password named “GoogleOne”, yes, I have a GoogleOne store), but none works.
I think I could boot into the old OS again, but I have no clue yet how I can “export” the Duplicacy configuration.
Duplicati btw. is fully operational after copying the %localappdata%\Local\Duplicati\ to the new system. But unfortunately it only holds my smaller backups.
OK, I am not able to start the old system any more, because MBR fun with windows.
Will set up Duplicacy from scratch. I really hope I can configure my Local and Google Drive storages properly again. Will have to deal with Google Drive token again… Yeah, especially upload to Google Drive weighs like “100 hours”. Will all take massive time, because my repositories were quite complex. I see, the old duplicacy.json will help.
Still I am curious, there is no way to migrate from old to new PCs? I mean, it could be so easy, because from Win7 to Win10 we can have perfectly matching paths.
Perhaps I am not getting your point, but there seems to be some confusion here re. the various passwords. So in principle you are dealing with (up to) 4 passwords/login credentials:
The login credentials to your backend storage (where needed). This would be handled by the gcd_token.json file in your case.
The encryption password (if any) for your Duplicacy backend storage. If you choose client-side encryption, then you can set a password on the Duplicacy backend storage. This is set (or not) on a per-storage basis.
The master password that Duplicacy uses to encrypt all your storage encryption passwords. This is the one that is usually stored in a keychain/keyring (or similar) if possible. From your descriptions, this is the one that you didn’t remember, because it was stored in the keychain/keyring and you probably never had to enter it beyond setting it once during the initial setup.
The admin UI password. This is an optional password that you can use to control access to the Duplicacy Web UI.
As I gather, you’ve lost password #3, but that doesn’t mean that you have to redo all your backups from scratch. Assuming that you still know password #2 (and of course have the credentials for #1) you can create a new storage that will connect to your old backup. So when you create a new storage and specify a location that already contains a Duplicacy backup, Duplicacy-Web will ask for the password of that storage and - assuming it’s correct - you’re once again connected to that storage and can proceed as before.
So the only “nuisance” is having to setup the various storages, backups and schedules again.
From what you describe you didn’t upgrade your computer from Win7 to Win10, but you “migrated” to a fresh Windows installation. How many software packages are able to being migrated between two different Windows installations by just copying their config files? Not very many I expect.
And had you actually remembered your master password (#3), it likely would have worked, which shows that Duplicacy-Web is a cut above the rest in this regard. Still I wouldn’t use this method of “migration” for myself and I rather rely on the fact that I remember the master password (or have stored it in a safe password vault).
Hi tangofan, thanks for your massive reply - yes, the “master password that Duplicacy uses to encrypt all your storage encryption passwords” is the one which got lost. I can’t remember, but I think on installing Duplicacy I may have thought “this is not a too important one, I have the storage encryption passwords anyway”. I guess I just stored it in Chrome PW Manager. And yes, there’s two Chrome profiles which both have a password for http://127.0.0.1:3875 - a super simple one which I use for worthless things. Exactly the one which I might have used! But it does not work.
As for the method of migrating Duplicacy, well it’s worth a try, this is not Adobe software and since it’s on different platforms, likely to not mess with win registry. Well andas I wrote, I run the regular installer, followed by copying of existing data. Not a too dirty method IMO
“So the only “nuisance” is having to setup the various storages, backups and schedules again.”
Not “only”. They were the complex part of it. Many specific folders, have already dealt with NTFS link problems, need to understand that Google token thing again, etc. etc.
OK, I think I solved it. So to summarize, transfering Duplicacy to a new Windows machine for me worked like this:
Installed Duplicacy on the new Windows. This Windows has the same path names, e.g. the userprofile path is the same as before.
Re-created just the storages via Duplicacy web-UI. Important: Important: Storage names as in the old installation!
[Optionally] Tested them - i.e., restore
Exit Duplicacy
Edited the “%userprofile%.duplicacy\duplicacy.json” and replaced parts with the old jsons contents:
a) “computers” and “schedules” sections b) “license_id” key
Transfer the old “%userprofile%.duplicacy-web\filters” to the new Windows
If the storage url is the same then Duplicacy should not upload most of the files. Can you double check the storage url? If you use a different backup id then it may appear as If it were uploading all the files but you will see that most chunks will not be uploaded since they already exist in the storage.
Thanks gchen, it was something different.
I have not transferred the “%userprofile%.duplicacy-web\filters” to my new windows. Now after I did, everything is fine!
