Show HN: Relica – Cross-platform local, remote, and multi-cloud file backups
relicabackup.com
relicabackup.com
We're really excited to share the beginning of our product! I'm personally a bit terrified, too. :) We have a lot of great features planned, besides the ones we've already implemented. (Coming soon: back up to your own cloud destinations such as your own S3 account or SFTP destinations.)
Feel free to sign up, give it a spin, share your referral link with others to get discounts, and let us know what you think!
As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out. If I can just have it in my own S3 bucket, I can do absolutely anything I like with my files. Count me as very interested if this is where you're going.
Also, trust and security are going to be huge. How do I know you're not going to leak and / or abuse the depth of access you get by owning my backups?
> Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?
If you edit your backup, you can create a custom hook (https://relicabackup.com/docs/backup-hooks). We plan to implement email notifications when such events occur as well.
> As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out.
We're implementing "Bring your own cloud" now, so you can provide your own S3-compatible, SFTP, Azure, or Google storage (more to come). This feature is almost done.
> Also, trust and security are going to be huge.
Backups are encrypted on the client, and the key is kept on your local device (don't lose it!). We can't access your data, and even your file selection is encrypted.
If I guessed that wrong, then anyway please answer because I want to know that too. Thanks!
Question: if the encryption key is kept on the device, how can I access data from another device?
Anyway, if you know your encryption password, you can perform a restore from any device with access to the destination.
The pages will all be revamped, but now we'll focus on keeping it simple.
(I make all my sites without templates/themes -- from-scratch HTML in an editor, because that's what I'm used to... it doesn't take very long and I know 100% what's going on as I make it. My cofounder Cory is more of the front-end guru though so we'll use the best tools between what we know!)
Just a thought. :)
I feel the firmware of those proprietary firmwares have been insecure and slow and non-cross platform compatible.
Also, Relica can back up to multiple cloud services with just a single upload of your data, whereas I believe with Arq it's one upload per cloud destination, lending itself to up to 5x faster backups. This is through our Relica Cloud destination which is optional for all users.
Relica technically already supports "bring your own cloud" (your own S3, Google Cloud, SFTP, etc - many others) but is still undocumented as we finish its implementation in the UI.
And your Relica membership can be made essentially free if you refer just a few people each year.
It seems like a pretty safe bet then, that this is a web interface on top of restic.
And although we may not start out with so many, Relica will be able to support about a dozen different backend storage types before the end.
I'm a little skeptical though -- I think the devil is in the details. It's a lot of work to make a highly reliable backup program. As a Windows user, here's a list of questions I'd ask:
1. Does Relica work with OneDrive on-demand files? [1]
2. Does Relica work with WSL files? [2]
Supporting all these corner cases on Windows, Mac, and Linux will be a TON of work.
[1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/learn-about-onedriv...
[2]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/15/wsl-file-sys...
So yeah, it's a lot of work. I know that there are major performance and correctness issues when dealing with OneDrive mounted storage and the equivalent for other sync services. Still, I've added your feedback to our list. Thanks!
How well does this work for developers? I had to stop using Dropbox because NPM/Yarn seems to do too many symlinks for Dropbox to understand and it never stopped syncing.
I then tried to switch to Google Drive backup but THEIR BACKUP + SYNC APP KILLS MY MACHINE because it's a huge memory hog. I have to kill it/restart ever since going there so now I'm looking to get off of this Google Monster.
I'd be excited to try your service but would love an answer to the above! Also, how does restore work? Your FAQ/docs are pretty light on screenshots of the actual software.
Good luck!
Restore works well also, it just runs in the background. Pretty simple right now, but we're actively participating in contributing to restic to make restores more interactive in the sense of progress reporting. We are not focusing on screenshots right now so we can revamp the UI, and we have some good ideas for restores, so you'll see it changing here in the next few months.
Anyway, we'd love for you to give it a try! Feel free to email us with any other feedback.
Let's say my entire computer is lost or stolen. What's the best way to restore? Can I restore my entire disk image? Or does Relica just backup individual files, meaning I'd have to repopuplate my environment, then use Relica to bring back files? Does Relica use one directory like Dropbox by default or does it backup my whole machine?
Relica does file backup, not disk imaging -- for various reasons. So you'll install Relica and restore the files either on your new computer, or just log into the website (without needing to install Relica) and download a restore file --- that web restore feature is coming soon; we just got it working in dev last week. :)
You can back up all the files your user has access to with Relica. You can actually run it as root (on Linux) but we need to write a how-to for that, since it unfortunately requires disabling automatic upgrades for now. We'll work on making it more flexible for these use cases once we've got the basics more covered.
Isn’t that kinda obvious? What you pay for is the ability for the developers to continue refining the application and keep adding useful features. Sounds reasonable to me at least.
This is more than just a hypothetical. One of the mentioned reasons for this application was the shutdown of CrashPlan for home users. Using a similar monthly fee plan doesn't show any more resilience than the service they are trying to replace. What's the likelihood that the same market realities that pushed CrashPlan to shut down such services don't also impact them?
More personally anecdotally, I bought a "bring your own cloud" multi-cloud backup tool many years ago. I still use it, even through several terrible pivots, because the core software has been stable/consistent/well-enough maintained at the time. They were bought by a cloud provider and dropped "bring your own cloud" and "multi-cloud" from their main focused products. They spun back out and are trying to be business-focused SaaS-only similar to CrashPlan's recent pivot. Neither of those pivots have been to my advantage, but again, for now, the original desktop application I bought all those years ago still works great. Had I opted for one of the more monthly paid SaaS products in either of those pivots, I would have been much worse off with each pivot.
Unfortunately, there's also no way that I can recommend people buy a product like mine because they no longer sell it in that manner (and haven't in years), and it's incredibly tough to avoid the SaaS business model in the backup space, but backup is one of the areas where such business models and safety from pivots is extremely important and the SaaS model seems almost to guarantee that pivots will happen.
1) We are currently adding a "bring your own cloud" feature to Relica -- in fact, it's already done, just undocumented while we finish up the UI for it.
2) Relica uses restic for the actual archival operations, so your restores can be performed with an independent, reliable, well-maintained, MIT-licensed open source tool.
And your membership subscription can become free if you refer others each year (they also get a discount). 3 referrals per year will keep your membership totally free.
We've also made a few contributions to rclone and restic so all the work we do on open source projects is available upstream to the main project's users.
I know of a couple efforts, either talked about or under way, to make an open source web UI for restic. One is a PR to add a sort of API to restic: https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1963 -- and another is here: https://gitlab.simbookee.com/andi/restic-gui.git
As for NAS integration, that'd be really cool -- I don't really know what is involved to make that happen but it's something we're going to look into!
EDIT: https://www.lightcodelabs.com/ lists a second person