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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I think Borg or Tarsnap use the right approach here: a map of blocks, updating a file updates only the changed block(s). It balances the efficiency of updates and the completeness of the copy. Sort of like FAT filesystem, only with block-level deduplication built in.

Of course you don't get a nice mirror of your files right in the cloud, unless you run a separate server that reconstructs it and makes available as traditional buckets.

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restic and duplicacy are the newer implementations of block level dedup encrypted backup.

From what I tested, restic has friendlier command line options but duplicacy is technically superior at this point (restore works way faster)

Restic's restore isn't parallelized at all, whereas its backup is. It should be straightforward to improve the restore performance.

https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1719

I use a Rubric appliance, that does block level dedupe and extends to cloud. I was able to instantiate a multi TB db, from the backup to a physical server in minutes. Extremely impressed .

I decided against a block- level system with Zero because I'm trying to make predictions about which files will be needed next locally and that's hard on a block level, I think.

I am wondering if there is a backup solution that works that way but without requiring a manual time consuming invocation.

Using something like inotify to record changed files and a worker in the background to immediately sync. Like dropbox.

http://www.arqbackup.com

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