Duplicacy: cross-platform cloud backup tool based on lock-free deduplication | Hacker News Reader

Duplicacy: cross-platform cloud backup tool based on lock-free deduplication

github.com

48 pointsacrosync29 comments

  During beta testing only binaries are available.

Why?! Surely this is the optimum time to provide source code, given the amount of trust one has to place in these things to not lose/misplace your data.

We're going to make this free for personal uses but not sure at this time what licensing model we should adopt.

As long as 'free for personal use' means 'closed source' then at least I would have a hard time trusting a tool backing up personal files into public cloud storage without transparency about how the crypto is implemented. I suspect that may also be the case for much of your 'personal use' target audience.

Since most HN commenters are concerned about the source code availability, we'll definitely reconsider the licensing model.

Please do!

The product & tech looks very promising. I'd hate to have to cross it off my shortlist due to trust issues.

Indeed please do! You're definitely scratching a very real itch here.

A thought: Do you think people would pay collectively (given the chance) like a fundraiser to publish the source, when a certain limit is reached? Maybe even pay the developer's bills that way? I wonder..

Especially when crypto is involved. Given the large number of completely broken cryptosystems, making this open source will give it a fighting chance to not be entirely broken.

Anything that handles critical data and sends it encrypted to third parties needs to be open source in this day and age or wont be used by people who take their data serious. Actually it doesn't even need to be sent to third parties to hit the open source requirement. Having crypto involved like you said is reason enough.

Attic + s3cmd sync works fine for me. At least, well enough that I won't be using a closed-source solution. If this is released as open source, great!

Unfortunately Attic seems to be abandoned (last commit 10 months ago). But there is a fork called Borg Backup that is actively maintained.

With s3cmd, don't you have to have a local copy of the backup somewhere although? So you have the content and the backup at the same spot, you can't directly backup to a remote server that way.

Yes, you need to have a local backup. I actually prefer that, it's another backup location for when files are accidentally (or deliberately) deleted or damaged.

How is this different than http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ ??

There is a section comparing Duplicacy with others: https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy-beta#comparison-wit...

Well, since it isn't open source - how does it compare with crashplan (another closed source, data deduplicating, free for personal use, cross platform backup solution...)

Crashplan doesn't support cloud storages other than their own. Neither does it support cross-client deduplication (https://www.facebook.com/CrashPlan/posts/10151056594185124).

BTW, why does your comparison table says "Full Snapshot: No" for duplicity? One can definitely use `duplicity full` to explicitly ask for a full backup.

By "full snapshot" I meant an incremental backup that still appears to be a full one. A full backup in duplicity is not an incremental backup so it is not qualified as a full "snapshot".

There is also http://www.duplicati.com/

I've been using Tarsnap for personal, encrypted, deduplicated backups for a few years. It's not shiny, but it works fantastically.

https://www.tarsnap.com/

I wish there was a version that one can run on their own servers.

But it is obscenely expensive. 1TB would cost you $256/month plus $256 to to your initial backup and another $256 if you ever need to restore.

I'm a big fan of Tarsnap and, of course, of Colin Percival.

Very interesting. Is it using VSS to backup on Windows ? Otherwise I don't see how it can really achieve a complete correct backup on Windows.

The best cross-platform backup tool I have found is Burp. However it doesn't backup to cloud.

Yes, there is a -vss option for the backup command.

Obligatory obnam plug: http://obnam.org

Wish I had seen this a few days earlier before throwing together my own AWS backup scripts (https://github.com/olalonde/offsite-aws-backup). Does this also support database backups?

It should. The variable-size chunking algorithm works well with database files.

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