chocolatey.veeam-agent VS Duplicati

My understanding is that full system backups on Windows requires the tool to create VSS snapshots and back up from the snapshot. Any tool that just copies files on the disk won't work.

I use Veeam Agent for this purpose (free, but not open source). It can do full system backups and supports both restoring to the same hardware and new hardware. Restores are done via a bootable WinPE-based image that the tool creates.

One cool thing about it I haven't seen in other backup software is that incremental backups work via a driver that tracks which disk blocks are changed as the system is running. It avoids the need to rescan the disk to detect what has been changed (though it will still do that if the filesystem is modified outside of Windows, eg. if dual booting).

The biggest downside is Veeam's website. It's pretty "enterprisey" and they want you to register to be able to download. I install via the Chocolatey package manager to avoid this. Chocolatey's package source has a direct link to the official installer [0].

There are no ads, nagging, nor upselling in the software itself. I have not seen it making any network connections outside of connecting to my backup target host and the auto-updates server.

I've been looking for open source alternative with a similar feature set, but haven't had too much luck. There's Bacula, but that seems to very much be designed for an enterprise use case.

[0] https://github.com/sbaerlocher/chocolatey.veeam-agent/blob/m...

Petabaytlarca veri emanet edilen şu kodun %85'i C# https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati

For my parents' computer, I'm using the canary version (which should be the alpha version I think?) of Duplicati since years.

It hasn't had a release in a little while but work is still occurring. https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati/actions.

Hey have a read at : https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati/issues/4041

I just came across this while looking through their issues to see if anyone else had reported the firefox issue i'm running into. I'm starting to have serious reservations.

I like duplicacy because of the way it keeps the chunks in the file system, without a special database. This makes it scale up really well no matter how many backups you have (you can even have multiple computers saved). It's kind of beyond weird how you select what you want to backup with the symlinks (using the command line version), looks more like what one would make for himself in a weekend (not that I'm complaining about free software!) but it's been without bugs for me and extremely efficient. In contrast duplicati has a perfect interface, it's well maintained and everything but bogs down in any large backup, has stories about people recovering for weeks for a very few local TBs and I've experienced for myself this, granted in the python that is checking the sha256 checksums of the backups but it makes it slower many times (possibly hundreds of times), nobody checked from 2013 to 2021 (or did it on tiny datasets like 1GB or was content to wait for weeks even on something small-ish)?