Understanding how Kopia UI manages multiple repositories

I’m relatively new to Kopia and initially could not understand how the Kopia UI app interfaces with multiple repositories. Eg, in windows, when I right click on the Kopia icon in my taskbar, I was seeing multiple repos listed, some of which it could not connect to.

I couldn’t find this documented, but after playing around for a while and reviewing log files, I figured it out & wanted to document my findings. This is based on my testing on the Windows platform:

  • When you start up KopiaUI, it looks for configuration files in its config directory (On windows, this is C:\Users[usernaname]\AppData\Roaming\kopia.
  • It will always look for a repository.config file, and even if that file does not exist, it will try to start up a connection which will never succeed.
  • It will also look for any files ending in “.config” and will try to start up connections to those as well.

So if you are like me and created multiple config files for testing purposes (eg, repository.orig.config, repository.test1.config, repository.test2.config, etc), KopiaUI will try to connect to ALL of them at startup, even if they are not intended to be valid.

Once I knew this, I could adjust the way I name my test files, eg I no longer end them in “.config”, which prevents the UI from using them at startup.

Hope this helps anyone else trying to figure this out!