Duplicati 1.3.4 / 2.0.1.44 Preview

Overview

Duplicati gives you the power to create backups of your important data and also encrypt them in a secure way. It has many features that include incremental backup operations as well as uploading of backups in remote servers or cloud services (Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Google Drive and others). Duplicati can be used either via its user interface or via command line.

Installation

Simply run the installer and follow a small number of steps to finish installing the product. There are no difficult settings throughout the procedure; in fact, the only settings you’ll come across are the ones asking you to create shortcuts, enable launch at system startup and include translations of the program.

No additional 3^rd party software are included in the setup package (toolbars, spyware, etc.).

Supported operating systems are Windows (any version), Linux and Mac OS X.

Interface

If it’s your first time running Duplicati you will be presented with the Setup Wizard which asks you to select an option: Setup a new backup, Restore files from a backup or Restore settings from a previous Duplicati installation. Supposing you choose the first option, you will be guided through creating your first backup with Duplicati. You’ll enter a name for it, select the folders you want to backup, pick a password for the backup (optional) and choose where you want to store the backup. After these steps you’ll be prompted to make a few, more advanced settings if you wish or leave the defaults and proceed to the actual backup operation.

You can see the status of the program by right-clicking its tray icon and choosing the Status item.

Pros

The backup wizard is very helpful both for beginners and experts. It provides all of its available features in a sequential way that doesn’t confuse or annoy the user. The backups can be stored in several places other than your computer, including Amazon S3, Cloudfiles (Rackspace), Google Drive, Windows Live SkyDrive, SSH, Tahoe-LAFS, WEBDAV and remote FTP servers. After they have been created they can be maintained with the incremental method, which basically looks for changes between the backup and the source directories and backs-up only those changes. The user can schedule the backups to be created on a regular basis.

When creating a new backup (or editing an old one) you have the option to secure them by adding password protection. Duplicati uses AES-256 encryption and the backups can be signed using the GNU Privacy Guard.

Open files can be backed up as well; in Windows this is achieved with the help of Volume Snapshot Service, and in Linux with Logical Volume Manager.

Cons

There is no option for creating differential backups.

Alternatives

Some of Duplicati's alternatives are Cobian Backup (free), CrashPlan (paid), SyncBackPro (paid) and PureSync (paid). As for online backup/sync solutions, Wuala (free/paid), Mozy (free/paid), MegaCloud (free/paid) and IDrive (free/paid) are good options.

Conclusion

Duplicati has everything you need when you want to safely backup and synchronize your files either locally or in a remote place. Inexperienced and advanced users altogether will find it useful and practical.