

Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Fast File Replicator for Windows - apankrat
https://bvckup2.com/
This is a long-running project that started as the proverbial need to scratch my own itch and then somehow evolved into a full-time job of the past 6 years.<p>Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bvckup2.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bvckup2.com</a><p>I thought I&#x27;d do a Show HN for two reasons.<p>1. I obviously want to show my baby to those who haven&#x27;t seen it.<p>Its primary purpose is to do very fast file replication. If you are familiar with &quot;robocopy &#x2F;mir&quot; - same idea, but on steroids. Lots of them. It can be used for both mirroring and archiving backups, among other things.<p>It is light, very small and it is really quite fast. Half of the development time was sunk into the UI&#x2F;UX design, so there&#x27;s that too.<p>Existing version is a result of 5 years of a _very_ careful evolution, focusing more on perfecting existing features rather than adding new ones. Said No to more feature requests than I can remember. The blog captures some of that in a form of development screenshots, sketches and what not [1].<p>2. Secondly, I wanted to add an anecdotal data point that the desktop software development <i>is</i> still very much an option despite of all the nasty rumors. The demand for well-written Windows software is still there. The biggest takeaway has been that there is LOTS of people, on Windows, that recognize software quality as a feature. They acknowledge and compliment it, and they are actively looking for it.<p>That&#x27;s <i>the</i> niche. If you are thinking of trying the Windows ISV path, I&#x27;d aim there.<p><pre><code>    --
</code></pre>
By the way of introduction - I&#x27;m in my mid 40s. I&#x27;ve been a programmer for my entire life, mostly on the sysdev side of things - firewalls, network stacks, VPNs, etc. - which is one of the reasons I still like things to be as small and as fast as possible. I&#x27;m also the original author of Hamachi VPN, there&#x27;s a chance you might&#x27;ve heard of it.<p>Any thoughts or comments on the program itself, would appreciate to hear them. If anyone has any questions, I&#x27;d be happy to answer them if I can as well.<p><pre><code>    --
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bvckup2.com&#x2F;wip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bvckup2.com&#x2F;wip</a>
======
apankrat
This is a long-running project that started as the proverbial need to scratch
my own itch and then somehow evolved into a full-time job of the past 6 years.

I thought I'd do a Show HN for two reasons.

1\. I obviously want to show my baby to those who haven't seen it.

Its primary purpose is to do very fast file replication. If you are familiar
with "robocopy /mir" \- same idea, but on steroids. Lots of them. It can be
used for both mirroring and archiving backups, among other things.

It is light, very small and it is really quite fast. Half of the development
time was sunk into the UI/UX design, so there's that too.

Existing version is a result of 5 years of a _very_ careful evolution,
focusing more on perfecting existing features rather than adding new ones.
Said No to more feature requests than I can remember. The blog captures some
of that in a form of development screenshots, sketches and what not [1].

2\. Secondly, I wanted to add an anecdotal data point that the desktop
software development is still very much an option despite of all the nasty
rumors. The demand for well-written Windows software is still there. The
biggest takeaway has been that there is LOTS of people, on Windows, that
recognize software quality as a feature. They acknowledge and compliment it,
and they are actively looking for it.

That's the niche. If you are thinking of trying the Windows ISV path, I'd aim
there.

    
    
        --
    

By the way of introduction - I'm in my mid 40s. I've been a programmer for my
entire life, mostly on the sysdev side of things - firewalls, network stacks,
VPNs, etc. - which is one of the reasons I still like things to be as small
and as fast as possible. I'm also the original author of Hamachi VPN, there's
a chance you might've heard of it.

Any thoughts or comments on the program itself, would appreciate to hear them.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them if I can as well.

    
    
        --
    

[1] [https://bvckup2.com/wip](https://bvckup2.com/wip)

~~~
degenerate
Thanks for creating Hamachi. I used it for older games that didn't have
internet play, but had LAN functionality, with friends online. I never knew it
was a solo project before LogmeIn bought it (and made it buggy/unreliable).
What a joyfully simple program that was!

~~~
wlesieutre
Oh wow, I've used both Hamachi and Bvckup, but never realized they were made
by the same developer. Two great pieces of software.

We used a couple of alternatives after LogMeIn bought Hamachi and retargeted
it at enterprise users, but none of them were ever quite as good. And as games
have continued to strip out LAN support and/or gotten better at working
through NATs, it's been a while since I needed anything like it.

No longer using Bvckup (my photo library doesn't live on my Windows machine
anymore) but it was a nice change of pace to run something where it felt like
the developer actually thought about the interface. With most utilities on
Windows that's really not the case.

~~~
apankrat
Hamachi had its place back in mid-00's, but I agree that a need for zeroconf
LAN bridging has gone down substantially since then.

I do think however that extracting its p2p tunneling bit into a separate
service could be a good thing to do even now. Its NAT punching was server-
driven, which was (and still is!) a superior way to do it. Better timing,
tighter port prediction. Heck, it could even establish _TCP_ tunnels through
the simultaneous open trick.

------
dang
Original Show HN from 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027405)

------
mruszczyk
I'm trying to wrap my head around the use case here. I love to support well
crafted native software so don't take this as a negative question. I often use
a tool such as Arq or Veeam to create snapshots in time of a folder or set of
folders that then get uploaded to a remote storage location or repository, to
recover files or documents from that time. I also use cloud storage providers
to keep a copy of data that I am working on in sync between devices.

I can't seem to tell but this product seems to be missing any additional
features to really fill a role that I lack. It doesn't appear to make
incremental copies of the data set to allow me to roll back in time, it does
track deleted items but interim changes are not kept or tracked, so it's
really just a capture of the state of the folder at last run time.

It's compared to robocopy but the tool assumes an empty initial destination
directory, there's no facility for copying data into a directory with content
in it already, so it's can't be used as a general file transfer tool.

It seems the best use case is for say transferring a directory of tarball
dumps to a remote location over SMB?

------
yboris
I've been a huge fan of the UI design of _bvckup_ for years -- the attention
to detail is heartwarming.

~~~
apankrat
Thanks. Little OCD goes a long way.

------
rkagerer
1MB executable and a short, simple EULA. Wish more software came like that.

Given the lack of dependencies, have you considered offering an installer-free
download? (The way Mark Russinovich does with SysInternals or Nir Sofer does
with NirSoft tools?)

~~~
apankrat
I have, but never got around to doing it. All other utilities (Diskovery,
CCSIOBench, etc.) are like that though already.

------
tabulatouch
Hi there, you have my upvote. I have been trying many solutions for a fast
deltacopy-based file replication, and yours is really the best. I am a
solopreneur too, living on my product in the last 9 years, somehow i "sensed"
this little software gem was the child of a similar mind ;) All the best!

~~~
lukevp
What is your product, if you don't mind? I'm always eager to hear stories of
entrepreneurs that aren't after VC funding or fast growth and are more about
the freedom of having your own business and product.

------
ryanoshea
I've used Bvckup 2 for years and found it the most reliable solution for PC-
driven backup and replication jobs on Windows. It has a few high-level feature
limitations that have bugged me (splitting a large folder backup across
multiple smaller drives, for example), but it nails the core competencies
better than anything else I've used.

~~~
apankrat
Re: splitting a backup across several drives - this has unique UI requirements
that aren't compatible with bvckup2's core Engine/UI model. The engine runs
all backups autonomously and the UI merely shows the progress. Conversely,
split backups are interactive - eject A, insert B, etc.

------
thrownaway954
"If you are familiar with "robocopy /mir" \- same idea, but on steroids. Lots
of them."

Do you have any comparisons and/or benchmarks. Doing the quick 10 second scan
of your site doesn't list any. So how do I know this is worth $30 for personal
use and a whopping $150 for servers when robocopy does just fine and is free
for both?

~~~
apankrat
Fair point. Benchmarks are in the pipeline, will be adding them soon.

Re: how do you know - there's a 2 week trial just for that.

------
AnonC
I tried bvckup2 maybe a year or two ago. But I stopped using it because of a
couple of license issues (?).

The thing is, my work machine is Windows but my employer doesn't have a good
backup solution (other than OneDrive, which I don't like much because of its
speed and restrictions). I wasn't sure if I could buy a personal license and
use it to backup my work machine at my own cost, since said employer wouldn't
pay for this or reimburse the cost. The personal license terms sounds strict
to prohibit such use. I'm not sure if that's what was meant though. The new
licensing model since June seems to address this, with no distinction on the
kind of use.

But the second issue was the cost of the license itself. It just is high for
me (due to currency and other issues), and I couldn't find any discount codes
either. Now I see that the prices seem to have increased further since June
2019 (so it's beyond my reach). I don't recall the feature set of the personal
license from before, but the new Basic version seems pretty basic, and seems
to have too many differences with the Pro Workstation version. Narrowing that
gap could make for better tiers, IMO.

~~~
apankrat
You are correct that you would've needed an Professional license for your
case. Personal licenses were basically a 50% discounted option for backing up
one's photos and music stash.

Re: pricing - it is what it is, sorry. We are trying to move towards pro IT
use and the pricing reflects that. Basic license is not really meant for home
use, but rather for certain very specific replication scenarios. In fact, I am
considering removing it altogether, because it only serves to confuse simpler
(read, non-IT) home users into thinking that it's meant for them, while it
_is_ quite restricted.

------
agumonkey
The website and application layout gives a sense of ultra high grade solidity.
The swiss flag doesn't seems out of place here.

------
Xamayon
Does this support backing up many TB many million file data sets to multiple
smaller target disks? I've been looking for a utility which can handle filling
a disk with as many complete files as possible, then allowing a new disk to be
inserted to continue.

This used to work great with tape utilities, but every hdd based copy/backup
utility I've tried assumes your backups will always fit on a single target
disk. Most also fail miserably after a few hundred thousand files, so it's
nice to see this one supports millions sanely.

~~~
apankrat
No, it doesn't support this type of usage. It's a very niche scenario and
there are some hairy usability issues with it, especially post-backup.

~~~
Xamayon
That's too bad, the site got my hopes up when I saw the 'unlimited size'
capability. It's really limited by the size of the target.

If you have any desire to support this kind of usage, I for one don't actually
care what happens after the backup. It would not be an updated backup, just a
copy the files to a set of disks fresh every so often.

In addition to the target not being a limiting factor size wise, using
independently mountable non-spanned/raided/etc disks can simplify recovery and
improve recoverability of files long term. Even if a few disks fail in
storage, the files on the others are perfectly accessible without special
software or hardware, and if multiple backup disk sets exist, the total number
of files lost would likely be very low.

~~~
apankrat
So I've been thinking about this scenario. Tell me this - say you have a mix
of files of different sizes. Would you expect the program to try and pack as
much files onto each drive (to maximize per-disk use) or copying files in
order and switching disks when the next file doesn't fit is OK?

If it's the latter, I think I might be able to cook up something command-line
for this sort of case. This is still a very niche scenario, but you aren't the
first one to ask about it.

~~~
Xamayon
Thanks for at least considering it! The latter would work in my scenario (just
copy until the next file doesn't fit, then pause and prompt for a new target).
The files I work with are seldom larger than a few hundred MB, and many are
only a few dozen KB. Even in the case where a few GB are wasted per disk due
to unusually large files showing up, a few GB is nothing compared to the
overall size of drives these days. I routinely waste at least that much when
doing similar multi-disk backups manually by selecting files which fit.
Simplicity and ease of use are big benefits when it comes to backing up
hundreds of TBs.

------
clausok
I really like your landing page. FYI: on the feature comparison page, when you
expand a row with the '+', the 'More on this...' links are not working yet.

~~~
apankrat
Thanks for the FYI, should be working as expected now.

------
mehrdadn
Does the tool replicate NTFS extended attributes, reparse points, short file
names, hardlinks, timestamps, and other metadata I can't think of at the
moment correctly?

~~~
apankrat
It replicates timestamps, attributes, DACL, SACL, group and owner info, as
well as alternate file streams. Replication of some of these is off by default
though.

It can follow symlinks, reparse and mount points, but doesn't replicate them.

It does not know about hardlinks.

~~~
mehrdadn
I see. Note that normal file attributes != extended attributes. Which one are
you referring to?

(For symlinks/reparse points, you'd probably have to provide an option on how
to replicate them, since there isn't one clear solution. But it's not
impossible to do something sane either. Link Shell Extension may have
inspiration on various methods you could use.)

~~~
apankrat
Regular attributes.

Extended attributes have been deprecated by Microsoft quite some time ago in
favour of ADS. It's not hard to add support for replicating them, but there's
literally no demand for that.

~~~
mehrdadn
Not sure where you got that idea (link?) but EAs are used in WSL, among other
things. Meaning you won't be able to copy WSL file systems properly right now.

As a general rule, you should avoid any information loss regardless of
anyone's opinion on the matter. No one is going to think "ah well,
Microsoft/etc. doesn't like this feature so it's ok my backup is messed up".

~~~
apankrat
I don't have a link ready, but this was explicitly mentioned in one of TechNet
articles on the subject dating back few years.

EA being used for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) - not much of a surprise,
really. It is a square peg in a round hole in many aspects. As I said, there's
zero demand for replicating EA, WSL or not.

~~~
mehrdadn
I think you'll find you're making a mistake, but up to you...

------
justsomeguy3591
I used this back when I was on Windows - an absolute delight to use. As a
developer I hope to someday create something as useful and well-designed as
this tool!

~~~
apankrat
Thanks, it's a very nice compliment.

------
mogpt
I’ve been very happily using Bvckup for my personal and work files for a
number of years now. Thanks very much for your pristine work.

~~~
apankrat
Glad you like it :)

------
b3lvedere
"Support for SAMBA quirks" As someone who has worked with a lot of NAS
products, i can relate to this a lot.

------
boromi
How does this integrate with a synology nas ? I've been thinking about picking
up a synology nas.

~~~
chosenken
I have been using Bvckup 2 to backup primarily to my Synology Nas. It
correctly identifies that the destination directory is a SAMBA v3.1 mount, and
treats it as NTFS.

I actually love using it for my Synology as it has the ability to do Delta
Copying. Some of my folders contain VM's and VeraCrypt drives, and it is very
fast when it comes to sending delta copies. It still has to read the file on
the destination to determine what to write, but that only becomes apparent on
large files. I think you may lose some features since it is a mounted network
drive(mainly limitations to SAMBA), but I have had no issues with it.

Scanning remote files is fast, if the contents or timestamps haven't changed
I've seen it scan over 600K files in a couple of minuets (duplicacy backup, in
the process of moving to a new hard drive and need to store it temporarily on
the Nas).

~~~
apankrat
I've been playing with doing file change detection based on NTFS journals.
There are some caveats, but it looks very promising. It's O(1) basically
instead of O(file-size).

------
dmitripopov
Hello from a fellow Windows mISV! I'd like to say that there are only two of
us remaining, but RSDN forum "Shareware and business" is still alive and
kicking.

~~~
apankrat
There are quite a few small ISVs out there. From the top of my head and in
areas related to my own - Arq backup, SoftPerfect, Syncovery. I don't think
Macrium and Glasswire are terribly big either. Ditto for 2BrightSparks.
HexRays. Boatload of smaller shops in the 3D tools/plugins domain. Lots and
lots of examples, they are just hard to notice because they look and feel
bigger than they actually are.

------
kup0
I love the focus on the UI/UX and performance. Looks like a solid, highly-
efficient application, something that is sorely missing (or at least hard to
find) on Windows

------
yodon
Does the website say whether it can be used for backup to S3/Azure/GCP/etc? I
looked and couldn't find either yes or no.

~~~
apankrat
Bvckup 2 operates at the file system level. It has no API-level integration
with cloud storage providers.

It can be used to backup onto any virtual drives emulated by the cloud client
software, which is, obviously, not the same thing, but a workaround.

Direct cloud storage integration _is_ on the dev plan, and it's possible it'll
be a separate (sister) product.

~~~
yodon
Separate product seems like it makes a lot of sense. I suspect for most it is
an either/or situation and you could keep each tool's user cognitive
complexity lower by shedding the unused stuff from the other destination
configuration.

------
unreal37
Congratulations! I bought this in 2015 and happy to see the license is still
valid!

------
beart
Not sure why but your domain is being blocked by one of the default pihole
lists.

~~~
apankrat
Lovely. Do you have any details?

~~~
beart
Sorry, not a default list. However, it looks like it's in this list which has
not been updated for some time. This list blocks websites that use canvas
fingerprinting.

[https://gist.github.com/CHEF-
KOCH/2dea75d43b2184f228ae94b168...](https://gist.github.com/CHEF-
KOCH/2dea75d43b2184f228ae94b168d275b1)

~~~
apankrat
Ah, OK. There were some issues with fraud back then, so had to resort to using
cookies that were initialized client-side.

------
kuroguro
Love the UI. Did you use some off the shelf UI library or is that custom?

~~~
apankrat
Thanks, it's custom. It's simpler than it looks. Except for fade-in/out
transitions. It's absolutely ridiculous how much effort it takes to make them
flicker-free.

------
farmerbb
Was just wishing I had a tool like this tonight. Thanks for sharing.

------
bmh
Any chance you'd be willing to share some revenue numbers?

~~~
apankrat
No, sorry.

------
hollerith
Huh. Why "Bvckup" and not "Backvp"?

~~~
apankrat
It's an upside down A... or at least that was the idea, which frankly wasn't
the very best one. I still wonder how many sales we routinely lose because of
the name.

------
markwakeford
Hello old friend :), wheres the DMG download ?? :P

~~~
apankrat
Once Jobs is back and Macs are put back in order.

------
AuCalc
What you think about aucalc.com?

------
nanobyte109
Free alternative freefilesync.org

