Snapshots

This page describes how to use the Duplicati Snapshots tool

The Snapshots tool is intended to test the system snapshot capability, and will invoke the same system calls as Duplicati to set up and tear down a system snapshot.

The Snapshots tool is called Duplicati.CommandLine.Snapshots.exe on Windows and duplicati-snapshots on Linux and MacOS.

To run the tool, invoke it with a folder to use for testing. To work correctly the folder should be on the filesystem/disk/volume/etc that will be part of the snapshot:

duplicati-snapshots <path to test folder>

The tool will do the following:

1. Create the folder if it does not exist

2. Place a file named testfile.bin inside the folder

3. Lock the file

4. Verify that the file is locked

5. Create a snapshot containing the folder

6. Check that the file can be read from the snapshot

7. Tear down the snapshot

On Windows, this will use VSS to create snapshots, which require elevated privileges, usually Administrator.

On Linux, this will use LVM and a set of shell scripts to obtain the vgroup and manipulate it. These scripts are located in the source folder lvmscripts and are named:

• find-volume.sh: Locates the volume where the given folder path is in.

• create-lvm-snapshot.sh: Creates the LVM snapshot and returns the path to it.

• remove-lvm-snapshot.sh: Removes a created snapshot

Usually, the operations require elevated privileges, for example root permissions.

For MacOS, the snapshots are not currently supported.