Duplicati Can't Access My Hard Drives

Help
1

Hi all,

How do I enable Duplicati to backup my data to either an external or internal secondary hard drive? I have used rsync and cron in the past but am trying to move to a system that regularly backs up my data, can encrypt it, and pretty much does it all in the background so I don’t have to think about it.

  • I’m running into the same issue on multiple NixOS PCs.
  • I have tried the simple things, such as show hidden files, adding my username & password, etc.
  • I am able to see my external HD on my laptop and copy/move files to and from it. Same with my internal HD in my desktop, albeit I do have to use my user password in Gnome in order to access it.

One of my weaknesses is fully understanding storage and permissions on any distro of Linux. I am thinking that I need to somehow enable secondary hard drives (both internal and external, not the hard drive that NixOS is installed on). I am currently unable to backup my data using Duplicati on any of my systems (mainly concerned about my laptop and desktop).

I have dabbled with editing my /etc/fstab in the past, but

  1. am not sure I even need to do so in this issue, and
  2. not sure if there is a nixified way of handling this if it is needed.

Any help / direction is much appreciated! Let me know if you need any additional information to help diagnose what is occurring.

2

Cross posting to:

in the hope that someone there has some experience with NixOS and Duplicati.

3

I have no idea why Duplicati will not work on any of my NixOS systems. I have moved to Borg, which works perfectly. My drives are fully accessible.

Duplicati works great for a nonprofit I have set it up for, albeit on Windows.

4

I have the solution. Add your user to the duplicati service in your nix config:

services.duplicati = {
  enable = true;
  user = "myuser";
};
5

Thank you for the information.

I’ll save this for future reference as I am not currently using Duplicati on NixOS, but I’m certain it will be useful for others who have a similar situation! Plus, maybe I’ll have a future use-case for it again.