Restoring

Equally important to creating a successful backup is the certain knowledge that the restore process will actually work in the event of an emergency. After selecting Restore from the menu, next select the backup to restore. Then press Next and select the desired backup (if you have several). Further down, check the box for the entire backup or the boxes for the individual files you want to restore.

In the Restore options window, then specify whether you want Duplicati to restore the files to the original location, or choose a different location – even a different computer – if necessary (Figure 10). In addition, you need to specify whether to overwrite the existing data or whether you want to keep multiple versions with a timestamp in the file name. You can also check Restore read/write permissions if required. All you need to do now is press Restore, and your data will be put back where it belongs.

Figure 10: After selecting the backup, you decide whether you want to restore the data to the original location or somewhere else – this can also be another computer. Besides this, you can overwrite existing data or have versions of the data, like with Git.

Conclusions

Duplicati is a very easy to use backup tool with multiple backup options. The software guides you step by step to your objective with an easy-to-understand menu. Operations are identical for all backup options and on all platforms, with just a few differences relating to the target specification. This simplifies use on multiple operating systems. Opened or locked files are backed up without your intervention thanks to the VSS service [3] on Windows and the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on Linux.

The range of backup targets, intuitive controls, and the fact that you can manage the encryption options make Duplicati a recommendable tool. It makes no difference whether the target resides locally, on your organization's servers, or in a third-party cloud. I did not encounter any problems during testing. Although Duplicati is intuitive to use, the documentation additionally provides useful assistance in case of issues [4]. It also describes command-line operations, which open up advanced options for backups that are not available in the GUI.