Starting a new duplicati backup

The Duplicati backup software is a nice cross platform backup solution. There are times when one wants to start a new backup with the same settings as another backup. Duplicati doesn’t support 2 backups going to the same directory, so one needs to make sure to specify a new destination for the new backup.

  1. Export the backup
    1. Click on the backup
    2. Click Export
    3. Click Export button (accept message about passwords)
    4. Save file to somewhere on your computer
  2. Disable scheduled backups of this job for now
    1. Click on the backup
    2. Click Edit
    3. Click Schedule
    4. Uncheck Automatically run backups
    5. Click Options
    6. Save
  3. Create a new backup from the old configuration
    1. Click on Add backup
    2. Import from file
    3. Select the file on your computer
    4. Import file
    5. Change the name from “backup name” to “{backup name} {today’s date}”
    6. Click on Destination
    7. Change the end of the Path on server to be the current date (this makes sure that we start in a new directory)
    8. Test connection
    9. OK to create
    10. Schedule
    11. Make sure there is a schedule set
    12. Options
    13. Save
  4. Delete the exported backup file from your computer so that the password isn’t left around for someone to find
  5. Start the backup

Cleanup of old backups

Once you are certain that the backup is working you should clean up the old backup from the destination to save space. Here are instructions for doing this when the backup destination is Nextcloud.

Delete the backup from the server

  1. Click on the backup you want to delete
  2. Click Edit
  3. Click on 2 Destination
  4. The Storage type will be WebDAV – if not, this won’t work
  5. Pay attention to the Server and port and the SSL checkbox.
  6. In “Path on server” everything before “/remote.php” is the path
  7. Put the following in the address bar of your web browser https://{host}:{port}/{path}.
    • Use “http” instead of “https” if “SSL” is not checked.
  8. Login with the username and password that is configured in the backup.
  9. Check the box next to the directory from the OLD backup.
  10. Click the 3 dots next to Actions
  11. Click delete
  12. Wait for it to finish
  13. Use the gear in the top right to log out

Alternatively I have also found that one can click the checkbox in Duplicati to delete the files from the server when deleting the configuration (see below) and that will remove the files from the server in most cases.

Delete the backup configuration

  1. Click on the backup you want to delete
  2. Click Delete
  3. Click Delete backup (leave delete remote files unchecked, this was done above)