dupReport

"Dear long-time-paying CrashPlan Home customer,

We value you and the great amount of money you have poured into our service. Unfortunately, your business is no longer valuable to us so we are closing our consumer business in favor of companies that can spend lots more money with us. You have six months to leave.

Good luck."

Bitter? Who's bitter?

Background

Like many CrashPlan customers, the notification in September 2017 that they would be closing their consumer-oriented CrashPlan Home service came as a bit of a shock to those who had grown accustomed to its easy, intuitive, and reliable system backup service. I'll spare you the gory details of searching for another backup provider and skip right to the part where I began implementing Duplicati as the backup service and Backblaze's B2 cloud service for data storage.

CrashPlan Status Reporting

Duplicati is not as easy or intuitive to set up as CrashPlan, but I was able to configure it to make the backups I wanted on a regular enough schedule to ensure data reliability. But there was one CrashPlan feature that Duplicati could not replicate: coordinated email status reporting. CrashPlan had a really nice feature whereby it would gather up the current backup status for all your systems and mail you a consolidated report on a periodic basis. It was a great way to make sure all your backups were current and to notify you if something was wrong.

Duplicati has no such capability. You can configure it to send you email when backup jobs completed, but you get a separate email for each backup job that runs. In the configuration I have (9 systems backing up to 2 different storage services in various combinations) that's 14 different emails per day. Compare that with CrashPlan's one summary email per day and you can see how this was a problem. Others on the Duplicati discussion forum noticed it, too. That started me thinking about developing a tool to provide summarized email notification for Duplicati users.

dupReport was born.

Download the Program

Source code and docs are on GitHub.

Discussion, suggestions, and bug reports can be made on the Duplicati Forum on this thread.

You can follow the project on Twitter: @dupReport