

Ask HN: What's your preferred open-source backup solution? - rubenv

I&#x27;m currently using backuppc [1], which I love because it can easily do both my servers (Linux) and laptops (OSX), isn&#x27;t too complex and does great pooling &#x2F; deduplication.<p>It&#x27;s also totally unmaintained, so it&#x27;s time to move on.<p>What do you use, what should I use?<p>Huge preference to open-source tools, I&#x27;d like to host this on my own NAS (Linux-based).<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;backuppc.sourceforge.net&#x2F;
======
fundamental
Currently rsnapshot, however I'm considering a move to duplicity (perhaps via
[http://chrispoole.com/project/horcrux/](http://chrispoole.com/project/horcrux/)
) in order to get the additional feature of offsite encrypted backups

~~~
nodata
Beware of huge cache directories.

~~~
rubenv
With rsnapshot of duplicity?

~~~
fundamental
I'm pretty sure that he means for duplicity. I'd imagine that this comes into
play when duplicity puts everything into a single file archive (tar IIRC). I
haven't seen any issues with rsnapshot in regards to this.

------
derekp7
If you don't mind, I'd like to plug my own open source tool, Snebu
([http://www.snebu.com](http://www.snebu.com)). It is a snapshot-style backup
system which uses a sqlite database for its data catalog (stores the list of
files/metadata associated with each backup set). Individual files are stored
using SHA1 checksums for the file names, so you get file-level dedup, even
across multiple systems.

I've just got it to a point where I've been dogfooding it for a year or so,
and feel comfortable promoting it more, but I'm not sure how to go about doing
that (other than packaging it for various distros, and submitting it to them).

------
Nowaker
Bacula. [http://bacula.org/](http://bacula.org/) At my company we are using it
for server backups. Linux desktop would do too. Google says it's possible to
use Bacula Client on Mac, but you'd need to figure out yourself.

Bacula is actively developed.
[http://www.bacula.org/git/cgit.cgi/bacula/log/?h=Branch-7.0](http://www.bacula.org/git/cgit.cgi/bacula/log/?h=Branch-7.0)
No risk of being unmaintained at some point, since they build commercial stuff
on top of community Bacula.

~~~
Someone1234
Becula is fine on Linux [server], but I'd never run it on Windows Server
again, it has no effective IO throttling (just number of concurrent jobs
throttling, which is ineffective). On Linux you can fix it using security
groups with limitations placed on IO specifically (at the kernel level).

It is better at several large files than thousands of small files. In fact
when you throw millions of small files at it it chokes pretty bad (CPU
skyrockets). So if you need to backup an SQL server data store you'll be just
fine, but thousands of XML files? Maybe not.

~~~
Nowaker
Thanks. OP wasn't interested in Windows. I have never been either, so I didn't
even know. Thanks for the info.

Regarding the small files performance - thanks for pointing it out. We are
using Bacula to backup JIRA & Confluence data stored directly on the disk as
files. Some customers have thousands of small attachments in their instances.
I haven't seen any performance problems though. Maybe because not only there
need to be thousands of small files, but also they need to change often, which
is not a case for us. Will keep this in mind. Thanks.

------
LarryMade2
For the servers I use a bash script utilizing TAR activated by a chron job. If
I were going to go deeper I'd be looking at bacuppc

Beside the maintenance regularity on it, what's wrong with it?

------
ThatGeoGuy
I actually wrote an article 8 months ago on how I do it
([https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2013/12/26/encrypted-backups-
in-d...](https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2013/12/26/encrypted-backups-in-debian/)).
Granted, this is for personal use, and really relies on cron / rsync to work
well.

Let me know if you have any questions about how I got it to work (for the most
part, the biggest issue I see you encountering is encrypting drives on OSX).

------
JustinGarrison
I've been using duplicati[1] for a while now. I usually just backup via ssh to
a server(s) for multiple copies but it can also use cloud storage providors
(S3, Google Drive, Box, etc). It's locally encrypted so it really doesn't
matter where the data ends up.

[1] [http://www.duplicati.com/](http://www.duplicati.com/)

------
mobiplayer
Déjà-vu because it uploads the backups to my Cloud Files account at Rackspace
(I have a private container for this)

------
rakoo
bup ([https://github.com/bup/bup/](https://github.com/bup/bup/)) is good,
although I haven't personnally tested the restoration.

------
nodata
obnam is pretty good.

~~~
fundamental
Hm, first time I've heard about this tool and I have searched around for
backup solutions similar to it a number of times. It strikes me as a project
that needs better word of mouth advertising, though it might just not have as
big of a userbase due to the fact that it is relatively young. Have you
observed any major drawbacks in your use?

After going through the documentation, the only major turnoff that I see is
that it fails to provide explicit documentation on the internals (ie when a
backup occurs A->B->C happens to your data using formats very well documented
in X, Y, & Z)

------
drakmail
backupninja

~~~
DanBC
[https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/backupninja](https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/backupninja)

------
pwg
rsnapshot

~~~
DanBC
[http://www.rsnapshot.org/](http://www.rsnapshot.org/)

