Déjà Dup Backup Tool

Déjà Dup Backup Tool is a graphical front end for duplicity and works on Linux. Read about Déjà Dup Backup Tool at launchpad.net/deja-dup. Déjà Dup is 1.3 MegaBytes to download and uses 8.6 MB on disk. The real disk usage will be all the backups.

Déjà Dup is written in Vala, C, and Python. I hate products that use a lot of programming languages mixed because the differences create so many weird errors and error messages. Vala compiles to C and Déjà Dup might be in the middle of a change from C to Vala. A straight C + GTK or C + Qt application would be better.

Déjà Dup is only a graphical front end for duplicity. I do not know how Déjà Dup uses Duplicity. I hate the Linux/Unix approach of writing applications as graphical user interfaces that then run a utility in the background because the information from the user interface is almost useless and sometimes misleading. A better approach is to write the application to use direct calls to the code library used by the utility. You then get accurate real time information and error messages from the code performing the work. I wonder which way Déjà Dup works?

The test

I decided to backup my directory on the machine where I am writing this page. Déjà Dup ran for a long time reading the files in the directory then stopped with a useless message about no data for the backup. There were lots of other problems and I gave up.

When I started Déjà Dup, there were only three parts to the display, the background, a backup button, and a restore button, shown above. The three parts appeared and disappeared randomly based on mouse movements and use of other applications. The user interface is faulty. Considering that the only thing Déjà Dup does is to provide a user interface, a failing user interface is of no use.

I pressed the backup button and stepped through the backup process. There was nothing to tell me what would happen next. The user interface could use one of those timeline displays showing you the next steps.

Déjà Dup ran for a long time without telling me what it was doing, as shown in the following image. The orange progress bar is not a progress bar, it just slides back and forth reminding people that something is happening.

I opened the details display, as shown in the following image, and found out Déjà Dup was reading the files in the source directory. there was nothing to tell me if Déjà Dup was backing up the files or just reading them in preparation for a backup.

Conclusion

Not for me. I do not need the aggravation of the faulty user interface and am not willing to risk creating backups using software that is unpredictable.