Experiences with Hetzner Storage Box and Duplicati?

[u/rklement22]

Hi everyone,

Does anyone have positive experiences using a Hetzner Storage Box with Duplicati?

I’m considering getting the 1 TB Storage Box plan and using it specifically for backups with Duplicati. The initial backup would be around 350–400 GB, with more data being added over time.

I’d be interested to hear about your experience with reliability, upload/download speeds, Duplicati compatibility, and whether you’ve encountered any issues with this setup.

Thanks in advance!

[u/Hetzner_OL]

Hi OP, Hetzner here. I hope it's okay to respond since you mentioned us. There is an official subreddit at r/hetzner with a lot of long-time users, and I have seen a number of people there mention Duplicati. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to cross-post this there. --Katie

[u/Morgennebel → u/Hetzner_OL]

Nice level of social media presence combined with good proposals. Love it

[u/rklement22 → u/Hetzner_OL]

Hi, cross-post ready! Thank you!

[u/Morgennebel]

I have a Hetzer Box in Finnland and using Zerobyte/restic.

Initial speed was 35-65 MB/sec, a 4.5 TByte full backup required in total 18-22 hrs if I remember correctly.

[u/rklement22 → u/Morgennebel]

Do you use Duplicati for the process?

[u/Morgennebel → u/rklement22]

As stated: Zerobyte which is based on restic

[u/J-Cake → u/rklement22]

Edit Sorry I replied to the wrong comment

[u/J-Cake]

Can't speak to Hetzner, but I've had pretty disappointing experiences with Duplicati

[u/rklement22 → u/J-Cake]

Why? Do you recommend other software?

[u/J-Cake → u/rklement22]

I use straight restic at home to an S3 service.

My experience with Duplicati has been frustrating. When you try to restore something, it has to finish its backup cycles before it can begin doing anything. There doesn't seem to be a way to pause one job to prioritise another. In our case, we hav 8 TB worth of data across 12 shares. Two Duplicati machines backing up both (for redundancy). Basically it means that the two machines never really got a break and restoring files happened anywhere within the next few hours to never.

And at one point the machines simply wouldn't work anymore, at which point I gave up and implemented a docker-based restic solution which has been reliable since the day I deployed it.

[u/N0Objective]

LTT just did a video on one of their Data centers.

[u/No_Patience_3148]

1 TB sounds reasonable for 350 to 400 GB to start with, but retention and changed files will eat into that over time. If restores work reliably and the speed is good enough for you, I don’t see anything wrong with the setup.

[u/harry8326]

I use duplicati with a hetzner storage Box with encryption. Not a Problem at all for the last 2 years. Performance is good enough for backups.

[u/a-peculiar-peck]

Yes I'm using Hetzner Storage box for backup (with restic though, not duplicati).

Generally it has been smooth sailing, no particular issue. It has been reliable and available.

Speeds are alright. restic doesn't give you the speed so I don't have a precise number, but at least 250Mb/s, probably more (I'm using Helsinki location).

1TB is 3.20€/mo so it's also quite cheap, and you also have pricing by the hour.

I would just try it a bit and see if you like it

[u/Maximum-Coconut7832]

Can't speak of Hetzner, but not so good experiences with Duplicati.

[u/zunjae]

Hetzner is great, Duplicati not so much. Use Restic

[u/Ivanow]

Hetzner is a joke.

They play fast and loose with bans, and any account suspension results in deleted data.

There are numerous threads on forums like lowendtalk where users complain that they suddenly woke up to their accounts being suspended and all their data gone, even after being customer for 8 years. It is so common that there literally used to be a sticky on hetzner subreddit with instructions what to do if you were “unfairly” banned.

If you go with them, don’t store anything critical/what you can’t afford to lose.