5 ms·

While rsnapshot and friends are useful as they provide a real file system (e.g., on a portable drive that can just be connected to another computer at any time,

by beagle3 10y ago

While rsnapshot and friends are useful as they provide a real file system (e.g., on a portable drive that can just be connected to another computer at any time, no app required), there are "bup", "borg backup" and (IIRC) "obnam", which all provide much faster snapshotting[0], much better space utilization (a change of 1 byte in a 1GB file takes 1GB for rsnapshot; it takes 4KB-128KB for the alternatives), compressed storage, and more. And if you want a "live" system, they provide a FUSE mountable system that makes every past revision look live. I haven't used obnam, but from the interwebs it seems like bup and borg are much much faster, with bup's forte being in the situation where many clients with similar files are backing up to a remote server over ssh (in this specific scenario, borg is slow and cumbersome), and in that it's just a git repository you can poke at. Otherwise, borg has encryption, deletion of old versions (still experimental in bup), and many other goodies. [0] not really an atomic snapshot, of course - they don't make any more or less guarantees than rsnapshot and friends.

ComodoHacker 10y ago
Add zpaq to the family. It also supports deduplication, encryption and offline catalog. The latter means you don't need access to old backups to perform deduplication. And it's cross-platform.
- beagle3 10y ago
  I tried zpaq four years ago and it looked very well built, but exceptionally slow (as in, 5-10 times slower than bup at the time). Have things changed?
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    I didn't compare with bup and can't say how much has it improved in four years. But yes, subjectively it's slow, mostly because of compression I guess. Not "exceptionally" slow though. With default settings it's a good tradeoff IMO.
NoGravitas 10y ago
I use obnam, and I've just read the manuals for bup and borg. It seems like obnam is more featureful and has better porcelain than either bup or borg, so that the script you end up writing to automate your backups is much simpler. But it is fairly slow. There are some tuning flags that will make it much faster than the default, but I would not at all be surprised if bup and borg are both much faster.
lighttower 10y ago
I've been using BUP with rsync.net for years. (for those who don't know, BUP is git based backup). I love how efficiently it identifies the deltas and only saves that. Admittedly, my use case is very light. It is for my personal PC --- and doesn't have any critical production databases that are constantly changing -- but for what it is worth, I've never had a problem. I started using it v0.24 (now it's 0.28) but I heard that earlier versions crapped out on a large VM images. As far as my usecase, I use bup's fuse-mount over SSHFS for backups stored on rsync.net ... and browsing the backup file-system is incredibly slow... I mean like 10 - 20 seconds to get an ls output.

by beagle3 10y ago

ComodoHacker 10y ago

Add zpaq to the family. It also supports deduplication, encryption and offline catalog. The latter means you don't need access to old backups to perform deduplication. And it's cross-platform.

beagle3 10y ago
I tried zpaq four years ago and it looked very well built, but exceptionally slow (as in, 5-10 times slower than bup at the time). Have things changed?
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  I didn't compare with bup and can't say how much has it improved in four years. But yes, subjectively it's slow, mostly because of compression I guess. Not "exceptionally" slow though. With default settings it's a good tradeoff IMO.

NoGravitas 10y ago

I use obnam, and I've just read the manuals for bup and borg. It seems like obnam is more featureful and has better porcelain than either bup or borg, so that the script you end up writing to automate your backups is much simpler. But it is fairly slow. There are some tuning flags that will make it much faster than the default, but I would not at all be surprised if bup and borg are both much faster.

lighttower 10y ago

I've been using BUP with rsync.net for years. (for those who don't know, BUP is git based backup). I love how efficiently it identifies the deltas and only saves that. Admittedly, my use case is very light. It is for my personal PC --- and doesn't have any critical production databases that are constantly changing -- but for what it is worth, I've never had a problem. I started using it v0.24 (now it's 0.28) but I heard that earlier versions crapped out on a large VM images. As far as my usecase, I use bup's fuse-mount over SSHFS for backups stored on rsync.net ... and browsing the backup file-system is incredibly slow... I mean like 10 - 20 seconds to get an ls output.