
Ask HN: Any backup software similar to version control? - mushly
Are there any incremental backup solutions that can both<p>1. Allow you to view the state an entire directory was in at a particular time (ala GitHub when you click on a particular commit)<p>2. Allow you to view the changelog of a particular file
======
modzilla
Apple's Time Machine keeps daily (or more frequent within a given day) snap
shots of all of your folders.[1]

Also, in any native OSX app each "save" works like a git commit, you can
browse all "versions." [2]

Combined, these native OSX features do exactly what you want.

[1] [http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250](http://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201250)

[2] [http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202255](http://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT202255)

~~~
LarryMade2
Similar in Linux is Back In Time

[http://backintime.le-web.org/](http://backintime.le-web.org/)

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striking
Just use Git (sans GitHub) for whatever you're doing. It works quite well on
just about any content (although viewing changes/merges is a little more
difficult without setting up special mergetools and difftools for special
files like images)

~~~
mushly
Hm, I thought Git doesn't handle versioning of binary blobs so well though?

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drifkin
Ori FS does replication and atomic snapshotting:

[http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/](http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/)

Some of its underlying architecture is very similar to git. Check out Section
5.4 of the paper:
[http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2530000/2522721/p151-mashtiz...](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2530000/2522721/p151-mashtizadeh.pdf)

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Ecio78
I'm not 100% sure because I haven't used it for few years, but BackupPc
normally lets you browse the files of a specific backup set but it has also a
"history" function for a directory that _maybe_ is what you're looking for:

[http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/BackupPCBackupBrowse.html](http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/BackupPCBackupBrowse.html)

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excpt
1.) VEEAM for VMware or Hyper-V does this job. You can access restore points
at a specific point of time. 2.) Never saw a file-diff tool implemented in a
backup software. You may only have backup logs for your incremental backups
about the size, duration, etc. If that's what you meant by view changelogs of
a backup file.

~~~
mushly
Heh, I don't need file-diff specifically. I just want to see for example this
file was last changed on Tuesday, and be able to pull up the Tuesday version.

~~~
excpt
This is exactly what you can do with VEEAM. You can even set your backup
strategy to continious integration. As soon as one backup up for the virtual
machine is done another incremental will be created; with minimal impact on
I/O performance. To save backup-disk-space you may want to enable
deduplication in VEEAM.

When you browse you backups you can choose from the available backups and you
can open and browse the complete file system at this specific date and time.
You can restore one or more specific files or directories directly back to the
origin destination or copy & paste them to a different location on any target.
You also can start the entire VM directly from backup at this state in an
isolated environment to access the system as a working machine. There are tons
and tons of more features inside this backup solution.

We run this solution in our office and for most of our customers with
virtualized environments. There is even a free version of veeam that lacks
datacenter features but you can backup your VMs.

Our usual backup intervals between 8a.m. and 9p.m. is 2 hours. We ensure to
have about 5 to 8 restore points during work ours.

So you will have to choose the Tuesdays version of the file at a specific
time.

You may want to give it a try if you're running ESXi or Hyper-V.

------
ak4g
Bup satisfies both.

[https://github.com/bup/bup](https://github.com/bup/bup)

But the frontend is kinda bare-bones. In many cases, it's git.

I have heard that attic is similar but more fleshed-out. But I have not tried
it myself.

[https://github.com/jborg/attic](https://github.com/jborg/attic)

