Deploy Duplicati

Deploy and Host

Duplicati is a free, open-source backup client that stores encrypted, incremental, compressed backups on cloud storage and remote servers. Deploy it on Railway in one click: one service, one volume, no companion databases. The deploy form has one generated field — the web UI login password, generated at deploy time and visible in the service variables. Open the public URL after deploy, sign in with that password, and run a backup of the seeded /data/source demo files to a local destination at /data/backups to prove the full backup → restore cycle before pointing Duplicati at real destinations.

About Hosting

Hosting Duplicati on Railway means the backup server runs as a single .NET process on Railway's infrastructure, with its server database, demo source files, and local backup destination on a persistent volume. There are no companion services to babysit: no Postgres to tune, no Redis to feed, no workers to scale. The wrapper maps Railway's injected PORT to Duplicati's web service port on every boot and pins the server datafolder to /data on the volume, so restarts and redeploys keep every backup job, schedule, and setting. Railway terminates TLS at the edge, and Duplicati's plain HTTP listener serves the full UI and API.

Why Deploy

• Real backups, not a demo. AES-256 encryption, deduplication, incremental backups, compression, and a scheduler, so backups happen on a schedule instead of when someone remembers a command.
• Every backend Duplicati supports. Local disk, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, GCS, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, OneDrive, Google Drive — configured in the UI, no credentials baked into the image.
• Lightweight by design. One server process; it idles small and spends CPU only while a backup, verify, or restore job runs.
• Restore from the browser. Browse any backup version and download or restore individual files without a terminal.

Common Use Cases

• A scheduled off-site backup console: S3 or B2 destinations backing up app data on a schedule with retention and verification.
• A personal snapshot browser: import an existing Duplicati backup configuration and browse/restore versions from the browser.
• A backup watchdog: scheduled jobs with failure reports, so a silent backup failure gets noticed.
• A staging area for data on the Railway volume itself: a local-backend repository for quick restores of app data (not a substitute for off-site backup).

Dependencies for

Duplicati on Railway depends on one persistent volume and a public domain. Everything else — port mapping, datafolder placement, demo source seeding, healthchecks — is handled by the wrapper at boot.

Deployment Dependencies

• Railway plan with persistent volumes (any paid tier; Duplicati idles small and spends CPU only while jobs run).
• One volume (duplicati-data, mounted at /data). No databases, no Redis, no workers.
• A public domain (Railway-provided is fine) for the web UI.
• For real off-site backups, storage-backend credentials (S3/B2/SFTP/ WebDAV/OneDrive), entered in the Duplicati UI — never in the template.

Configuration