Duplicati vs Kopia: Pick Your Self-Hosted Backup Tool

If your business data exists only on one server, it does not exist at all. One hardware failure, one ransomware attack, or one accidental deletion, and years of records disappear. Duplicati and Kopia are the two leading open-source backup solutions for self-hosted infrastructure. They solve the same problem differently.

Duplicati: Visual and Accessible

Duplicati provides a web-based interface for configuring and monitoring backups. Schedule backups to run daily, weekly, or hourly. Choose from over 20 storage destinations: Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, or a local folder. Duplicati encrypts data before upload using AES-256, so even your cloud storage provider cannot read your backups.

Duplicati's strongest feature is its web UI. Non-technical users can configure a backup in minutes by selecting files, choosing a destination, setting a schedule, and clicking Save. The dashboard shows the status of every backup job, recent results, and storage usage. For a business where backups need to be managed by someone who is not a system administrator, Duplicati is the clear choice.

Kopia: Fast and Snapshot-Based

Kopia takes a different approach. It creates point-in-time snapshots of your data with content-addressable storage and deduplication. Multiple snapshots of the same data share storage space because identical blocks are stored once. This makes Kopia extremely fast for incremental backups: only changed data is transferred.

Kopia supports a wide range of storage backends including S3, Azure, GCS, Backblaze B2, SFTP, WebDAV, rclone, and local filesystem. It can be run as a CLI tool, a GUI application, or a server. The snapshot-based approach means you can restore to any point in time, not just the most recent backup. Kopia is ideal for technical users who need fast, efficient backups with granular restore capabilities.

Which One Should You Choose?

• Choose Duplicati if you need a visual interface, scheduled backups, and easy configuration for non-technical users
• Choose Kopia if you need fast incremental snapshots, deduplication, and granular point-in-time recovery
• Use both: Many businesses run Duplicati for daily application backups (databases, file stores) and Kopia for system-level snapshots

VPS1 configures both Duplicati and Kopia as part of our managed infrastructure. Your data is encrypted, distributed across multiple storage locations, and recoverable from any point in time. See our pages for Duplicati and Kopia.