Backup

Summary

Borg

• Fastest.
• Does not necessarily require server setup. Access repo via Samba.

Would be more secure though via server access.

• Multi client is still experimental.

Bup

• Fast but initial copy slower than Borg, incremental faster than Borg.
• Faster if access repo via server.
• Cannot purge easily.

UrBackup

• Very nice front-end (web-based). Nicer than BackupPC.
• Fast, but slower than Borg/Bup.
• Ridiculously high number of files in repo, which makes it difficult to manage / stat.

BackupPC

• Nice front-end.
• Require server access.
• Ridiculously high number of files in repo, which makes it difficult to manage / stat.

Online backup

rsync.net

• Use Borg as backup solution.
• Praised by several users.
• Start plan at $18/yr for 100GB storage (ie. 1.5 ct/GB/month).

CrashPlan

CrashPlan is one of the online backup solution recommended by LifeHacker.

• Family plan $150.00 / year for 2 to 10 PC.
• Available for Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Unlimited storage

Backblaze

An alternative to Crashplan. See Backblaze B2 for backup with duplicity.

Tarsnap

Tarsnap is a deduplicated, encrypted online backup service for the truly paranoid. It works on UNIX-like operating systems, and has backup plans starting from $0.25/GB-month.

Advised by MIT Hacker-tools.

Local backup software

List of backup software.

Attic

• https://attic-backup.org/

Maybe best to consider its fork instead: BorgBackup.

BackupPC

See BackupPC.

BorgBackup

See BorgBackup.

Borg is actually a fork of Attic.

• Reddit post

With interesting comments, config... Also mention cloud solution rsync.net with support for Borg/Attic and ZFS.

Bup

See Bup.

Burp

See Burp.

First impressions

• Protocol 1 appears fast, but doesn't do cross-client deduplication. Protocol 2 is still experimental, and is very slow.

Obnam

• https://obnam.org/

Tutorial, manual.

Reviews

• What is the expected performance of obnam? Or: why is it so slow?

Pros

• Can be tuned to make it much faster (up to 10x, with extra memory though) [1]

Cons

• Slow with small files [2]
• Very slow, in particular large backup [3], [4].

SimpleSnap

SimpleSnap is a tool to backup ZFS snapshots easily.

Pros:

• Very fast snapshot (25s).

Cons

• Requires ZFS
• Not cross-machine deduplication.

Speed seems very interesting. But how setup ZFS? Maybe some hints in this benchmark from same author.

UrBackup

See UrBackup.

Looks promising. Server-centric like BackupPC.

Pros

• Consistent backup using snapshots!

Snapshots created with dattobd or LVM snapshot on Linux, and VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) on Windows.

Cons

• Does not support storing repo on Samba FS (because create symlinks). But this can be fixed by using NFS.

BlobBackup

A new contestant.

• See https://blobbackup.com/.
• See Hacker News comments.

Other

• Amanda
• Bacula
• Backupninja
• brackup
• Duplicity
• rdiff-backup (review)
• rsync (Optimal remote backups with rsync over Samba) (rsync + zfs snapshot from [5])
• ZBackup
• S3QL
• Restic - Lot of praise coming from this HN post, however comment on github says Restic is much slower and uses more resources on the server side.

For Windows:

• Bvckup2, claimed to be fast, efficient, simple.
• veeam and macrium (from this HN post).
• Windows 10 backup and restore (maybe only on Pro).

Tools and features

dattobd

Datto Block Driver is a kernel module for taking block-level snapshots and incremental backups of Linux block devices.

LVM snapshots

Taking a Backup Using Snapshots - LVM How-To.

Other

• Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)

How well?

List of backup reviews:

• 5 Awesome Open Source Backup Software For Linux and Unix-like Systems (November 6th, 2014)

Review Bacula, Amanda, Backupninja, Backuppc, and UrBackup. Also cite Rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, Burp, Duplicity, SafeKeep, DREBS.

• Comparison of Attic vs Bup vs Obnam (March 31, 2015)

Attic wins hands down on big data set for backup, and in all cases for restore (much much faster).

• bup vs attic silly benchmark

Both looks similar. Attic a bit faster.

• Synchronization and backup programs

Compare features of many different backup software. See also update from User:Level323.

• Compare Borg to *

Issue tracker on Borg to compare it with alternatives.

• Roundup of remote encrypted deduplicated backups in Linux

Mainly compare Obnam and Attic/Borg.

• Research on deduplicating disk-based and cloud backups

Compare ext4, S3QL, SDFS, zfs-fuse (fastest).

• Backup on freehackers.org

Very long list of backup software with Pros and Cons.

What?

A backup checklist.

On Linux

• /home directory
• /etc directory
• /usr/local directory
• /root directory
• /var directory

In addition:

• Get a copy of crontab (although they are in /var. For each user:

crontab -l

• Get list of installed packages:

dpkg -l
dpkg --get-selections

• Copy all mysql database (although they are in /var and /etc.

sudo su -
mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > mysql-$HOSTNAME.dump