Will a samba share work over Tailscale?
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
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You don't actually need Duplicati on her end at all, Duplicati can back up to a plain SFTP or WebDAV target, or S3, so her side just needs to recieve files. The simplest setup I've seen for a non-technical friend is SFTPGo in Docker over Tailscale, it has a web UI for managing a user and a folder, and nothing is exposed to the internet.
Keep the encryption on your side, Duplicati encrypts before upload, so she only ever sees encrypted blobs, and store the passphrase somewhere seperate from the backup itself. Set a quota if you can, agree on how much disk she is giving you, and test a restore to a spare folder once, a backup you haven't restored is just a hope. FYI scheduled backups plus a monthly restore test is what actually saves you when a disk dies.
Thanks, the plan is to give her a hard drive and USB enclosure. I'll check out SFTPGo, are there any docker apps that serve as an easy S3 bucket?
EDIT: SFTPGo looks great I just tested it out and it's very simple, thanks for the recommendation!
I can't recommend duplicati, I had issues with restoring from it, I now use restic
If you want something a bit more reliable than Duplicati with a similar list of supported platforms, look into Kopia, its GUI (KopiaUI) is a lot more convenient if you're not used to the command line. I find restore ops to be faster than Duplicati, and unlike Duplicati I've never experienced database corruption. For opening a webDAV instance that you can use as a data bucket for your files remotely, I've been very impressed with Copyparty.
I looked into that but unless I'm mistaken, KopiaUI is not a docker app
Kopia(UI) is a client you run on your system, yes. It's not containerized or web-managed, though I think there might be a web UI you could host for managing the CLI version. The Docker container on your pal's setup would just be presenting you with a network folder that you point the backup system at.
What platforms are you working with? Borg might serve you better than Duplicati, but last I checked there's no official Windows version.
There's also Kopia. I haven't used it much personally but I've heard good things. It supports a range of upload protocols: https://kopia.io/docs/features/#save-snapshots-to-cloud-network-or-local-storage
Docker so it should be OS-independent, right?
Also I'm not looking to upload I'm looking for the docker app my friend installs to receive my backups.
I meant on your own system, running the backup software, since it sounds like Duplicati isn't the best choice. Borg is a great backup program but it's made for Linux. Kopia is cross-platform.
Sorry, I don't have a go-to recommendation for the receiving end. In theory anything that can host WebDAV, SSH/SFTP, or an S3 endpoint would do the job.
In theory anything that can host WebDAV, SSH/SFTP, or an S3 endpoint would do the job.
Sounds like Rclone, which can host all of these protocols, has a web UI, and can act as a REST server for Restic as well. Haven't tried it yet, though! Just leaving it here as an additional option to consider.
Rclone does provide a docker image, too: https://rclone.org/install/#docker
I'm probably going to set this up soon myself, as I am in the process of building a little home server for my family.
Also I know I could do SyncThing easily over tailscale but I'm looking more for a backup options with scheduled backups.
If you keep any of your backup files locally, you could use ST to sync them over to her.
But yea, sync is NOT backup (I realize you know, more of just like to say this whenever ST is mentioned, and I use ST extensively).
Yeah, sync is not a backup.