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. See this post on how to setup B2 (here for a NextCloud server).

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.

Hetzner

Hetzner offers cheap storage box:

• e.g. 1TB / 10€ / month

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.

Restic

• A new software: https://github.com/restic/restic
• A detailed deployment: https://amontalenti.com/2024/06/19/backups-restic-rclone
• From this Hacker News link on Timeshift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41039967
• Rustic: an alternative written in Rust: https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic

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 and this Borg vs Restic comparison 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