I’ve been using Duplicacy-Web for a few weeks now and have been very happy so far with it. In fact I’ve already recommended it to a friend and will deploy another copy soon for a family member’s backup.
Having said that I still see some areas of improvements in the user experience, so I have collected some items that I consider to be useful for the overall user experience. As far as I can tell none of these items impact the the core backup (CLI) tools. Instead they are quality-of-life improvements that will make the Web UI a smoother experience for the user.
So I hope that this will be an inspiration for future Web-UI development.
- In the Storage, Backup And Schedule Tab:
- If users have multiple entries in storages/backups/schedules, allow them to rearrange the order by moving entries up and down (like you already allow for jobs within a single schedule). This is just a visual help, but a useful one, so the most relevant entries can stay on top and test/debug entries can go further down the list.
- Storage Tab:
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Allow users to change the display name of a storage. Since this appears to be only for display in the UI, this should have no effect on the backups.
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Allow users to change the duplicacy password for an encrypted duplicacy storage. AFAIK the CLI tool can already do that, would be nice to have integrated into the UI.
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Allow users to reenter the cloud provider’s credentials (including specifying again the location of any credential token files and/or reloading that file into the Duplicacy configuration). Right now you have to delete and recreate the storage, if you change your cloud provider’s password or want to move the credential token file. It would be much more convenient, if you could just change your storage setting.
- Backup Tab:
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For a backup job I can set options within the job, but I can also set options within the backup definition itself. (Though when running a job, it appears to ignore the options in the backup definition.) This is a bit muddled and could be made clearer. Perhaps only allow the definition of options in one place.
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The “Add” icon for backups is on the top right, whereas on the “Storage” and “Schedule” tabs it’s on the bottom left. Perhaps it should be on the bottom for backups as well for the sake of consistency.
- Schedule Tab
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Instead of configuring the mail credentials for each schedule separately, provide a generic configuration of one or more “mail destinations”, which includes their credentials. Then in the schedule the user can just select the mail destination.
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Provide the option to only send mail, when an error occurred in one or more of the jobs.
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Since jobs in a schedule might be dependent on each other, an option to stop the current execution of the schedule, when an error has occurred in a job, would be useful.
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It is too easy to accidentally delete a job from a schedule or move it up and down (especially on a tablet with fat fingers like mine). An option to be able to lock and unlock a schedule for editing would be useful, so accidental changes won’t happen.
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The “Name” field in the “Schedule new jobs” popup is very small and needlessly so. Please make it bigger.
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A “Pause” option for schedules would be useful. Right now it is possible to effectively pause schedules by unchecking all days, but a pause option would be simpler, quicker and more clear.
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It would be great to have a copy function for schedules that would copy the current schedule with all jobs and options to a new one with the name "Copy of ". The new schedule should be paused (or all days unchecked), so it won’t kick off accidentally.
- Other:
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When you click on the “Duplicacy” icon on the top left, the home page should open in a new tab or window, instead of replacing the current window (the same way the “Forum” link already works).
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The “cross” icon (red “X”) is used to denote deletion of a setting/configuration. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to use a trashcan icon for that, since frequently the red “X” just means “cancel”.
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Provide an option to automatically delete logs older than nnn days (with nnn configurable in the UI).