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Another one? Ten years ago I had trouble finding anything, then over time I learned of duplicity (2002?!¹), bup (2010), restic (2015), borg (2010)... all basica

by lucb1e 5y ago

Another one? Ten years ago I had trouble finding anything, then over time I learned of duplicity (2002?!¹), bup (2010), restic (2015), borg (2010)... all basically solving the same problem of encrypted incremental backups. The landing page doesn't mention why they made yet another solution. In the comments someone also mentions bvckup2. Is there an overview somewhere of all the different solutions? Any selling points here? ¹ That's way older than I expected, but it's also the first one I found and I stopped using it because it took many gigabytes on my then-250GB SSD for a local cache just to be able to do incremental backups. Maybe that's why I had the feeling I couldn't find anything good at the time.

MikusR 5y ago
It has a gui and works on Linux/Windows/MacOS. Also has both deduplication and compression.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Thanks! Still a bit strange to me that they started a whole new project rather than contribute patches or fork something else. The only one I'm fairly familiar with is restic. It also compiles for the major OSes and has deduplication. For compression, I think there are patches available, but alternatively they could just have contributed one. That leaves tying the command-line interface to a few buttons in a GUI. Edit: Kopia turns out to be from 2016. I guess the author didn't know of the others yet, or the others weren't as mature. This makes a lot more sense, somehow the .io domain and my first hearing of it only now made me expect this was written recently.
  - poronski 5y ago
    To each their own. For a lot of people it’s way more fun to make a new thing than to fork and patch someone else’s.
  - MikusR 5y ago
    Restic issues for adding GUI and compression are 7 years old. If if there was interest/"easy to do" for implementing them that would have been done.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      What I meant is that the author of Kopia could have done that and made their life a lot easier compared to starting all the way from scratch. But I posted that before realizing that Kopia is barely a year younger than Restic. But of course it could also just be what u/poronski said in a sibling comment. His Noodly holiness knows I make a lot of software that already exists just because I enjoy the making and having it customized. In fact I think I also started... let me `stat` that directory... yup, in 2016 I started working on (and abandoned) my own implementation of encrypted backups. Also because online storage prices were through the roof (~40x the hardware cost price with servers and bandwidth included) and I thought I could do that cheaper.
rglover 5y ago
Easy on the gas, bud.
mekster 5y ago
If you think it's just adding up similar tools, you're pretty wrong. I've only used kopia briefly and it had a bug where I couldn't simply read files from its GUI, so I'd take it it's still doing basic implementations but all the tools you mentioned have varying degree of reliability and performance as well. You can easily Google around and see how restic takes huge memory and is slow to restore on larger repo, duplicity being unreliable and you'll find less of those reports for borg which I believe is the only open source tool of the kind that is reliable and doesn't stall on restoration. I want to use multiple implementations for doing a backup towards multiple remote targets in case one implementation has a corruption bug but so far my research only shows it's better to just use borg twice to different remote targets than use another implementation that could be unreliable. duplicacy also takes lots of memory to the point of freezing up a machine with 2GB+ free ram while taking medium sized repo that is only in the range of 50GB with many small files. (Not to mention I don't like its per machine license which can be costly if you handle many small servers.) Backup tools are something that is so sensitive about its reliability. It must be working from the beginning as it's too late when your backup data was corrupt but you only realize that when your original data is already inaccessible as not many people do backup data integrity check frequently. Reading on its feature list doesn't mean much but do yourself a favor and check for GitHub issues, check the forum for bug reports and maybe even Reddit and figure if they're fighting primitive bugs or not. You should rely on a solid tool than just one of the remote backup tool, like using rsnapshot locally first. It uses rsync and hard links, which is quite hard to break. Here are a few reports on instability for a few tools. 1. https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-as-destination-for-borgbackup/12717/9 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-as-destination-for-borgbac... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/eg0zpe/duplicati_seems_too_fragile_for_realworld_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/eg0zpe/duplicati_se... 3. https://forum.duplicati.com/t/is-duplicati-2-ready-for-production/4714/6 https://forum.duplicati.com/t/is-duplicati-2-ready-for-produ...
duckmysick 5y ago
Which backup solution are you using now?
NilsIRL 5y ago
> Is there an overview somewhere of all the different solutions? https://github.com/restic/others https://github.com/restic/others

by lucb1e 5y ago

MikusR 5y ago

It has a gui and works on Linux/Windows/MacOS. Also has both deduplication and compression.

lucb1e 5y ago
Thanks! Still a bit strange to me that they started a whole new project rather than contribute patches or fork something else. The only one I'm fairly familiar with is restic. It also compiles for the major OSes and has deduplication. For compression, I think there are patches available, but alternatively they could just have contributed one. That leaves tying the command-line interface to a few buttons in a GUI. Edit: Kopia turns out to be from 2016. I guess the author didn't know of the others yet, or the others weren't as mature. This makes a lot more sense, somehow the .io domain and my first hearing of it only now made me expect this was written recently.
- poronski 5y ago
  To each their own. For a lot of people it’s way more fun to make a new thing than to fork and patch someone else’s.
- MikusR 5y ago
  Restic issues for adding GUI and compression are 7 years old. If if there was interest/"easy to do" for implementing them that would have been done.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    What I meant is that the author of Kopia could have done that and made their life a lot easier compared to starting all the way from scratch. But I posted that before realizing that Kopia is barely a year younger than Restic. But of course it could also just be what u/poronski said in a sibling comment. His Noodly holiness knows I make a lot of software that already exists just because I enjoy the making and having it customized. In fact I think I also started... let me `stat` that directory... yup, in 2016 I started working on (and abandoned) my own implementation of encrypted backups. Also because online storage prices were through the roof (~40x the hardware cost price with servers and bandwidth included) and I thought I could do that cheaper.

rglover 5y ago

Easy on the gas, bud.

mekster 5y ago

If you think it's just adding up similar tools, you're pretty wrong. I've only used kopia briefly and it had a bug where I couldn't simply read files from its GUI, so I'd take it it's still doing basic implementations but all the tools you mentioned have varying degree of reliability and performance as well. You can easily Google around and see how restic takes huge memory and is slow to restore on larger repo, duplicity being unreliable and you'll find less of those reports for borg which I believe is the only open source tool of the kind that is reliable and doesn't stall on restoration. I want to use multiple implementations for doing a backup towards multiple remote targets in case one implementation has a corruption bug but so far my research only shows it's better to just use borg twice to different remote targets than use another implementation that could be unreliable. duplicacy also takes lots of memory to the point of freezing up a machine with 2GB+ free ram while taking medium sized repo that is only in the range of 50GB with many small files. (Not to mention I don't like its per machine license which can be costly if you handle many small servers.) Backup tools are something that is so sensitive about its reliability. It must be working from the beginning as it's too late when your backup data was corrupt but you only realize that when your original data is already inaccessible as not many people do backup data integrity check frequently. Reading on its feature list doesn't mean much but do yourself a favor and check for GitHub issues, check the forum for bug reports and maybe even Reddit and figure if they're fighting primitive bugs or not. You should rely on a solid tool than just one of the remote backup tool, like using rsnapshot locally first. It uses rsync and hard links, which is quite hard to break. Here are a few reports on instability for a few tools. 1. https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-as-destination-for-borgbackup/12717/9 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-as-destination-for-borgbac... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/eg0zpe/duplicati_seems_too_fragile_for_realworld_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/eg0zpe/duplicati_se... 3. https://forum.duplicati.com/t/is-duplicati-2-ready-for-production/4714/6 https://forum.duplicati.com/t/is-duplicati-2-ready-for-produ...

duckmysick 5y ago

Which backup solution are you using now?

NilsIRL 5y ago

> Is there an overview somewhere of all the different solutions? https://github.com/restic/others https://github.com/restic/others