8 ms·

Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

92 points by bimbashrestha 6y ago

leppr 6y ago
What are the advantages compared to say, Rclone which is open-source and supports a wide variety of storage backends[1] and E2E encryption[2] as well? [1]: https://rclone.org/overview/ https://rclone.org/overview/, [2]: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/
- bithavoc 6y ago
  It's minimalistic, I went to check Rclone but couldn’t find schedules backups or a GUI so I can already see how this app could be appealing to some.
  - seized 6y ago
    RClone is more about copying folders/files between storage systems, it doesn't pack files together like other tools. I use Rclone for larger files like pictures or media files that don't change or move around, pure sync to targets. You can use cron to run it if you want.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Hey! Thanks for asking. On mobile right now so this isn't comprehensive but a few advantages jump to mind. 1. Compression/deduplication. Your data will (generally speaking) take up about half the space it did before even including the multiple file versions. 2. Automation. You won't have to manually do anything after you configure a schedule once. 3. Management of multiple backups. 4. A really nice native GUI 5. All the advantages that backup with file versioning has over sync (which is what it looks like you have). Safe from ransomware (you'll have an older version always even if your infected ones get synced accidentally), projection from human error by being able to revert to older versions, etc
- brailsafe 6y ago
  I'd be more curious what the advantages are compared to Arq.
  - bimbashrestha 6y ago
    It's generally faster to backup [1], way faster to restore [1], backups use less space [1], has a native app for each OS and usability (subjective I know but give the two a shot yourself) is better imo. [1] Benchmark on open data set. https://blobbackup.com/10_gb_benchmark.php https://blobbackup.com/10_gb_benchmark.php
    - zigzag312 6y ago
      How does it scale to larger datasets (TBs of data)? For example, Duplicati is much slower with large datasets compared to small/medium datasets, because of it's database. Once, the database grows too large (eg. multiple GBs), it becomes too slow to be usable. Which version of Duplicati was used in this benchmark?
      - bimbashrestha 6y ago
        Operations are streaming and there is no local database. So memory consumption and config data storage are very tiny by design. The largest backup a user has reported using this with has been 5 tb and it ran without a hitch. I'm pretty sure it was the latest duplicati for the benchmark. Maybe the second latest. I forget.
- ajvs 6y ago
  Duplicacy would have been a better comparison since it and blobbackup are backup tools, whilst Rclone is built for sync and has supporting tech like mounting for that usecase.
jfdi 6y ago
Nice work! If one were to buy this and want to back everything up from local device(s) and cloud accounts back down to a local NAS - supported use case?
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Ah this isn't supported right now. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to add but it's just never been brought up by users till now. What is your use case for this?
  - bimbashrestha 6y ago
    Or maybe I'm confused about your question haha. Do you simply mean is it possible to restore backups to local? Or a reverse backup operation from cloud to local?
    - sooheon 6y ago
      Is the idea is to avoid using local resources to back up to two places, but only once to send to cloud and then handle cloud->NAS elsewhere?
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      Not the parent, but if you're ever looking for features to implement: I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and one reason I've been unhappy with any sort of cloud backup solution is that they're usually too slow for laptops, unless I leave them awake while I'm sleeping. An ideal backup solution for me would be laptop > NAS (or desktop) > cloud. A backup over the local network should be magnitudes faster, and the always-on NAS can handle a slower, versioned backup to cloud storage.
      - bimbashrestha 6y ago
        Well you could configure BlobBackup to do something kinda like that. I know some users run backups to their NAS every 6 hours and then run a weekly backup of their NAS to the cloud using whatever NAS software it came with (alternatively you could sync it through your laptop).
greatjack613 6y ago
I am blown away by this. Very simple and elegant. Nice Job. What tech stack is this application built in?
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Thanks! Its built in a combination of C and python. Using zstandard for compression and openssl for crypto. Qt for the GUI.
conqrr 6y ago
The one thing that finally works for me for backup is restic (https://restic.net/ https://restic.net/). I use linux and set my home dir to a different partition, Run a daily script that uses restic to backup to backblaze. Smooth as butter and hopefully I don't need to use it. Curious what this uses under the hood, wouldn't be surprised if it was restic.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  It uses a custom algorithm and data format but uses a similar deduplication technique to restic. There is bit of info in the docs page about this [1]. [1]: https://blobbackup.com/docs.php#data-format https://blobbackup.com/docs.php#data-format
  - arkadiyt 6y ago
    > Blob file names are the SHA256 hash of the unencrypted blob contents Obviously this is needed to make block level deduplication possible, but it also means that for this "end to end encrypted" product someone can still tell whether or not you own a given file. This is probably fine for most people but worth calling out.
    - bimbashrestha 6y ago
      Good catch. But the SHA hash is salted per backup destination though. So you can't figure out the content from the hash alone. EDIT: I should make note of that on the docs page really. It currently gives the impression that I'm just straight up calculating the sha of the content.
- dddw 6y ago
  Restic is great indeed. Takes some time to get started, I appreciate that encryption comes first.
rsync 6y ago
We (rsync.net) will test this out immediately - we're always happy to see tools like this that support plain old SFTP. If, for any reason, you'd like a free test account, just email info@rsync.net. Thank you for building this!
- earthscienceman 6y ago
  Huh. You have an "ARM" logo on your webpage, is that this ARM?? https://adc.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp https://adc.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
  - dewey 6y ago
    It's the older version of their current logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.
    - earthscienceman 6y ago
      Computing arm, hmm. I had always seen that in lower case. Thanks!
- aptmiguk 6y ago
  Your pricing link appears to be down: "The requested URL /resources/regulatory/pricing.html was not found on this server."
- mekster 6y ago
  Do you have any recommendations on backup tools? I figured borg is stable and does the job but others, including restic have problems like memory usage concerns and I'm just a single person shop and don't have any huge assets to backup and already seeing restic/duplicacy choke consuming GBs of memory. What are the tools that are performant and stable? I'd like to at least use another implementation besides borg in case a bug corrupts the data. Encryption, retention policies, incremental backup without periodical full backup and acceptable performance (that people don't fill GitHub issues with performance problems) are requirements and deduplication is a plus.
rkagerer 6y ago
On Windows does it use VSS to snapshot the volume and backup open (locked) files?
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  That's a heavily requested feature that's in the works. I was focusing on platform independent features in the beginning but this will come eventually.
eps 6y ago
Aesthetics-wise this looks very heavily "inspired" by https://bvckup2.com https://bvckup2.com. The UI is basically a 1-to-1 copy of an older version: https://blobbackup.com/images/logs.png https://blobbackup.com/images/logs.png http://bvckup.com/img/shot-6.png http://bvckup.com/img/shot-6.png "Good artists create, great artists copy", but that's a bit too close for comfort.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  IMO that UI is simple and generic enough that it wouldn't be impossible for them to have come to it independently.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- TacoSteemers 6y ago
  I see that they are almost the same, but my version would probably end up looking the same if I were to independently write a GUI for backups. Similar to how desktop word processors and browsers all look the same; some patterns just make sense for a specific type of software.
  - huhtenberg 6y ago
    It is surprisingly hard to come up with a simple and concise UI even if it may seem all too trivial in retrospect. Given that this one uses secondary control labels that are verbatim of Bvckup's, has the same layout and opening screen, and nearly identical look and feel, this is certainly not an independent effort.
    - TacoSteemers 6y ago
      I do agree that there is a difference between 'similar' and 'nearly identical', and these seem nearly identical.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
undebuggable 6y ago
How are you dealing with low storage scenarios? e.g. HDD 256 GB, 50GB of free space available, total backup data for compressing and encrypting 100GB.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Well generally speaking, backups will use about 37-40% of the original size. BlobBackup uses variable length and fixed length block level dedupe and zstandard compression. So you can optimize by adjusting block sizes, changing compressing levels, etc to get things to fit on smaller storage.
me_bx 6y ago
The solution looks interesting, good work. Website does not inspire trust as there is no mention at all about who the seller is. Terms of use, privacy policy are also relevant, especially in this context where software gets access to all of customer's data...
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Yeah more info would be great. First time software seller here so I'm a little slow on some things but rest assured, I'm gonna have a privacy policy soon. The EULA is there when you download the software. BlobBackup doesn't store any user data anywhere other than the user's computer and their backup storage though (and this is encrypted).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vijaybritto 6y ago
39.99? Hmm. I would have said no if it was just electron. But the native UI is compelling.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Pricing is pretty competitive with some alternatives with similar performance/features imo. Arq, duplicacy, qbackup...
aim4min 6y ago
How does this compare to BorgBackup? https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/
- aim4min 6y ago
  I found this comparison between borg and restic, and it seems like most of these apply. (https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/ https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/) seems like blogbackup and restic are very similar. Wish there were more docs though.
  - mekster 6y ago
    borg has been around for a while and I hear it's stable. They also have change logs that mention any corrupting bugs, which is getting quite rare for only on few occasions. I'm migrating from restic to borg. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html The downside of borg is that the target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3 and some other targets but there are online services that accept sftp. On the other hand, restic is new and while this can sync towards many targets, the use of memory gets crazy after a while that my machine choked out of memory and these kind of stability problem is something not mentioned in the docs until you use it. I've tried several others like duplicacy but this also has a memory problem and both restic and duplicacy seem to have trouble fixing it quickly. When it comes to backup, I'd like to use more than 1 implementation toward different remote locations in case 1 of the implementation has corruption bugs to render the backup useless. Trying out kopia to see if it does any better. https://kopia.io https://kopia.io Also asuran seems promising but so far too early to test it out. https://asuran.rs/ https://asuran.rs/
    - bimbashrestha 6y ago
      Yeah the main difference between borg (and their GUI vorta) and a lot of the other options (BlobBackup included) is the non sftp storage support. I would have used restic directly as a backend for BlobBackup had it not been for the awful prune operation. Downloads a ton of data everytime, prone to errors, and has to repack blobs. Compression would be nice too but they have nice dedupe so it would have been workable without.
mdotshell 6y ago
Have you thought about adding CLI support to the roadmap? If you were to add that it would be an instant buy for me, as well as many other admins, I'm sure. Great product though! Always happy to see projects like this
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Yes! CLI will be included in the next release. Have gotten this request a few times now:)
  - mdotshell 6y ago
    Very good! Will definitely follow up
  - mdotshell 6y ago
    One more question: Has BlobBackup been tested with hundreds of thousands, to millions of files in a single backup archive? I've had issues with backup software in the past choking during backup/restore with a very large number of files.
    - bimbashrestha 6y ago
      The limiting factor with BlobBackup will be the number of files the storage backend can handle in one directory. Generally speaking BlobBackup will create slightly more files in your destination than your original source. With object storage like s3, b2, azure, wasabi etc, this just isn't a problem since you can effectively have as many objects in one "directory" as you want. With local, nas or hard drive storage, you'd be limited by the number of files per directory the file system allows (4.2 billion for NTFS for example). So you're probably fine here too. Google drive (which isn't recommended for large backups with BlobBackup) has much stricter restrictions on files per directory. So really it depends on the backend but for most use cases it isn't a problem. BlobBackup has been tested on millions of files backed up to NTFS and object storage yes.
      - 6y ago
prirun 6y ago
Would you include HashBackup (author here) in your next round of benchmarks? Thanks!
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Hey! Sure thing.

92 points by bimbashrestha 6y ago

What are the advantages compared to say, Rclone which is open-source and supports a wide variety of storage backends[1] and E2E encryption[2] as well? [1]: https://rclone.org/overview/ https://rclone.org/overview/, [2]: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/

bithavoc 6y ago
It's minimalistic, I went to check Rclone but couldn’t find schedules backups or a GUI so I can already see how this app could be appealing to some.
- seized 6y ago
  RClone is more about copying folders/files between storage systems, it doesn't pack files together like other tools. I use Rclone for larger files like pictures or media files that don't change or move around, pure sync to targets. You can use cron to run it if you want.
bimbashrestha 6y ago
Hey! Thanks for asking. On mobile right now so this isn't comprehensive but a few advantages jump to mind. 1. Compression/deduplication. Your data will (generally speaking) take up about half the space it did before even including the multiple file versions. 2. Automation. You won't have to manually do anything after you configure a schedule once. 3. Management of multiple backups. 4. A really nice native GUI 5. All the advantages that backup with file versioning has over sync (which is what it looks like you have). Safe from ransomware (you'll have an older version always even if your infected ones get synced accidentally), projection from human error by being able to revert to older versions, etc
brailsafe 6y ago
I'd be more curious what the advantages are compared to Arq.
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  It's generally faster to backup [1], way faster to restore [1], backups use less space [1], has a native app for each OS and usability (subjective I know but give the two a shot yourself) is better imo. [1] Benchmark on open data set. https://blobbackup.com/10_gb_benchmark.php https://blobbackup.com/10_gb_benchmark.php
  - zigzag312 6y ago
    How does it scale to larger datasets (TBs of data)? For example, Duplicati is much slower with large datasets compared to small/medium datasets, because of it's database. Once, the database grows too large (eg. multiple GBs), it becomes too slow to be usable. Which version of Duplicati was used in this benchmark?
    - bimbashrestha 6y ago
      Operations are streaming and there is no local database. So memory consumption and config data storage are very tiny by design. The largest backup a user has reported using this with has been 5 tb and it ran without a hitch. I'm pretty sure it was the latest duplicati for the benchmark. Maybe the second latest. I forget.
ajvs 6y ago
Duplicacy would have been a better comparison since it and blobbackup are backup tools, whilst Rclone is built for sync and has supporting tech like mounting for that usecase.

jfdi 6y ago

Nice work! If one were to buy this and want to back everything up from local device(s) and cloud accounts back down to a local NAS - supported use case?

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Ah this isn't supported right now. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to add but it's just never been brought up by users till now. What is your use case for this?
- bimbashrestha 6y ago
  Or maybe I'm confused about your question haha. Do you simply mean is it possible to restore backups to local? Or a reverse backup operation from cloud to local?
  - sooheon 6y ago
    Is the idea is to avoid using local resources to back up to two places, but only once to send to cloud and then handle cloud->NAS elsewhere?
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    Not the parent, but if you're ever looking for features to implement: I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and one reason I've been unhappy with any sort of cloud backup solution is that they're usually too slow for laptops, unless I leave them awake while I'm sleeping. An ideal backup solution for me would be laptop > NAS (or desktop) > cloud. A backup over the local network should be magnitudes faster, and the always-on NAS can handle a slower, versioned backup to cloud storage.
    - bimbashrestha 6y ago
      Well you could configure BlobBackup to do something kinda like that. I know some users run backups to their NAS every 6 hours and then run a weekly backup of their NAS to the cloud using whatever NAS software it came with (alternatively you could sync it through your laptop).

greatjack613 6y ago

I am blown away by this. Very simple and elegant. Nice Job. What tech stack is this application built in?

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Thanks! Its built in a combination of C and python. Using zstandard for compression and openssl for crypto. Qt for the GUI.

conqrr 6y ago

The one thing that finally works for me for backup is restic (https://restic.net/ https://restic.net/). I use linux and set my home dir to a different partition, Run a daily script that uses restic to backup to backblaze. Smooth as butter and hopefully I don't need to use it. Curious what this uses under the hood, wouldn't be surprised if it was restic.

bimbashrestha 6y ago
It uses a custom algorithm and data format but uses a similar deduplication technique to restic. There is bit of info in the docs page about this [1]. [1]: https://blobbackup.com/docs.php#data-format https://blobbackup.com/docs.php#data-format
- arkadiyt 6y ago
  > Blob file names are the SHA256 hash of the unencrypted blob contents Obviously this is needed to make block level deduplication possible, but it also means that for this "end to end encrypted" product someone can still tell whether or not you own a given file. This is probably fine for most people but worth calling out.
  - bimbashrestha 6y ago
    Good catch. But the SHA hash is salted per backup destination though. So you can't figure out the content from the hash alone. EDIT: I should make note of that on the docs page really. It currently gives the impression that I'm just straight up calculating the sha of the content.
dddw 6y ago
Restic is great indeed. Takes some time to get started, I appreciate that encryption comes first.

rsync 6y ago

We (rsync.net) will test this out immediately - we're always happy to see tools like this that support plain old SFTP. If, for any reason, you'd like a free test account, just email info@rsync.net. Thank you for building this!

earthscienceman 6y ago
Huh. You have an "ARM" logo on your webpage, is that this ARM?? https://adc.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp https://adc.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
- dewey 6y ago
  It's the older version of their current logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.
  - earthscienceman 6y ago
    Computing arm, hmm. I had always seen that in lower case. Thanks!
aptmiguk 6y ago
Your pricing link appears to be down: "The requested URL /resources/regulatory/pricing.html was not found on this server."
mekster 6y ago
Do you have any recommendations on backup tools? I figured borg is stable and does the job but others, including restic have problems like memory usage concerns and I'm just a single person shop and don't have any huge assets to backup and already seeing restic/duplicacy choke consuming GBs of memory. What are the tools that are performant and stable? I'd like to at least use another implementation besides borg in case a bug corrupts the data. Encryption, retention policies, incremental backup without periodical full backup and acceptable performance (that people don't fill GitHub issues with performance problems) are requirements and deduplication is a plus.

rkagerer 6y ago

On Windows does it use VSS to snapshot the volume and backup open (locked) files?

bimbashrestha 6y ago
That's a heavily requested feature that's in the works. I was focusing on platform independent features in the beginning but this will come eventually.

eps 6y ago

Aesthetics-wise this looks very heavily "inspired" by https://bvckup2.com https://bvckup2.com. The UI is basically a 1-to-1 copy of an older version: https://blobbackup.com/images/logs.png https://blobbackup.com/images/logs.png http://bvckup.com/img/shot-6.png http://bvckup.com/img/shot-6.png "Good artists create, great artists copy", but that's a bit too close for comfort.

SahAssar 6y ago
IMO that UI is simple and generic enough that it wouldn't be impossible for them to have come to it independently.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TacoSteemers 6y ago
I see that they are almost the same, but my version would probably end up looking the same if I were to independently write a GUI for backups. Similar to how desktop word processors and browsers all look the same; some patterns just make sense for a specific type of software.
- huhtenberg 6y ago
  It is surprisingly hard to come up with a simple and concise UI even if it may seem all too trivial in retrospect. Given that this one uses secondary control labels that are verbatim of Bvckup's, has the same layout and opening screen, and nearly identical look and feel, this is certainly not an independent effort.
  - TacoSteemers 6y ago
    I do agree that there is a difference between 'similar' and 'nearly identical', and these seem nearly identical.
bimbashrestha 6y ago

undebuggable 6y ago

How are you dealing with low storage scenarios? e.g. HDD 256 GB, 50GB of free space available, total backup data for compressing and encrypting 100GB.

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Well generally speaking, backups will use about 37-40% of the original size. BlobBackup uses variable length and fixed length block level dedupe and zstandard compression. So you can optimize by adjusting block sizes, changing compressing levels, etc to get things to fit on smaller storage.

me_bx 6y ago

The solution looks interesting, good work. Website does not inspire trust as there is no mention at all about who the seller is. Terms of use, privacy policy are also relevant, especially in this context where software gets access to all of customer's data...

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Yeah more info would be great. First time software seller here so I'm a little slow on some things but rest assured, I'm gonna have a privacy policy soon. The EULA is there when you download the software. BlobBackup doesn't store any user data anywhere other than the user's computer and their backup storage though (and this is encrypted).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vijaybritto 6y ago

39.99? Hmm. I would have said no if it was just electron. But the native UI is compelling.

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Pricing is pretty competitive with some alternatives with similar performance/features imo. Arq, duplicacy, qbackup...

aim4min 6y ago

How does this compare to BorgBackup? https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/

aim4min 6y ago
I found this comparison between borg and restic, and it seems like most of these apply. (https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/ https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/) seems like blogbackup and restic are very similar. Wish there were more docs though.
- mekster 6y ago
  borg has been around for a while and I hear it's stable. They also have change logs that mention any corrupting bugs, which is getting quite rare for only on few occasions. I'm migrating from restic to borg. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html The downside of borg is that the target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3 and some other targets but there are online services that accept sftp. On the other hand, restic is new and while this can sync towards many targets, the use of memory gets crazy after a while that my machine choked out of memory and these kind of stability problem is something not mentioned in the docs until you use it. I've tried several others like duplicacy but this also has a memory problem and both restic and duplicacy seem to have trouble fixing it quickly. When it comes to backup, I'd like to use more than 1 implementation toward different remote locations in case 1 of the implementation has corruption bugs to render the backup useless. Trying out kopia to see if it does any better. https://kopia.io https://kopia.io Also asuran seems promising but so far too early to test it out. https://asuran.rs/ https://asuran.rs/
  - bimbashrestha 6y ago
    Yeah the main difference between borg (and their GUI vorta) and a lot of the other options (BlobBackup included) is the non sftp storage support. I would have used restic directly as a backend for BlobBackup had it not been for the awful prune operation. Downloads a ton of data everytime, prone to errors, and has to repack blobs. Compression would be nice too but they have nice dedupe so it would have been workable without.

mdotshell 6y ago

Have you thought about adding CLI support to the roadmap? If you were to add that it would be an instant buy for me, as well as many other admins, I'm sure. Great product though! Always happy to see projects like this

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Yes! CLI will be included in the next release. Have gotten this request a few times now:)
- mdotshell 6y ago
  Very good! Will definitely follow up
- mdotshell 6y ago
  One more question: Has BlobBackup been tested with hundreds of thousands, to millions of files in a single backup archive? I've had issues with backup software in the past choking during backup/restore with a very large number of files.
  - bimbashrestha 6y ago
    The limiting factor with BlobBackup will be the number of files the storage backend can handle in one directory. Generally speaking BlobBackup will create slightly more files in your destination than your original source. With object storage like s3, b2, azure, wasabi etc, this just isn't a problem since you can effectively have as many objects in one "directory" as you want. With local, nas or hard drive storage, you'd be limited by the number of files per directory the file system allows (4.2 billion for NTFS for example). So you're probably fine here too. Google drive (which isn't recommended for large backups with BlobBackup) has much stricter restrictions on files per directory. So really it depends on the backend but for most use cases it isn't a problem. BlobBackup has been tested on millions of files backed up to NTFS and object storage yes.
    - 6y ago

prirun 6y ago

Would you include HashBackup (author here) in your next round of benchmarks? Thanks!

bimbashrestha 6y ago
Hey! Sure thing.