Duplicati is inspired by another backup application, namely Duplicity and implements in C# an important part of its code. It has both a graphical user interface and a command-line interface. Once installed, the program places itself in your system tray, running silently in the background. The GUI interface is separated in different windows that you can access from the tray, namely the backup status window, the options window and the set up wizard, which allows you start one of the following actions: schedule a new backup, edit, remove or run a backup and restore files from a backup.

In order to configure a new backup you only need to follow few sequential steps. Firstly, your new task needs a name. Then you need to select the files and folders you want to store; I most appreciate that Duplicati displays the memory used by the selected documents. The security step follows next; in order to protect your data you need to set up a password and choose between the AES-256 and the GNU Privacy Guard encryption method. Once you are secure, feel free to select a transfer destination; you can pick a cloud service, namely Rackspace Cloud Files, or a remote server, such as FTP, SSH and Amazon S3. Then you need to configure the selected destination, which is different from a service to another, and you are done.

From the Options window you can apply several changes, such as language, notifications, password and encryption, upload and download limit, S3 options and SSH and GPG paths. You also have the possibility to pause, stop and throttle backups. The built-in scheduler enables Duplicati to save and store in a secure way all the files that were not saved since the last backup, saving at the same time storage space and bandwidth.