Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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"I can't praise Unison enough. I've been using it every day for over 10 years and is easily one of the most useful pieces of software I've ever come across."

Unison was the first backup binary that we built into the rsync.net platform - breaking our original design goal of only offering client agnostic SSH and the tools that would run over that.

Shortly afterward we also added rdiff-backup. Both of these tools were quite popular and we saw a lot of interest back in 2005 - 2010 but we see very little use or interest in them now.

All of the interest in backup clients is now in rclone[1], restic[2] and borg[3].

restic was easy - you can point it at any SFTP capable host.

borg and rclone, on the other hand, we had to (like unison and rdiff-backup) build and maintain on the rsync.net server side.

All of these (save rclone, which is a binary executable) are python scripts. But we don't have a python interpreter (or any interpreter) in our very locked down platform. Can anyone guess how we do that ?

[1] https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/3254

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/restic.html

[3] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

> Can anyone guess how we do that?

Like you did with attic and borg? Quoting you on January 2016:

> We solved the problem by (cx)freezing the attic and borg python tools into binary executables. So, still no python in our environment (reducing attack surface) but the ability to run attic and borg just like they are meant to be run.

As seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925123

Correct!

I only just found out about borg and restic, but the sites I looked at both mention "backup" prominently. And that makes sense. If I ever sign up for rsync.net, it will be so I can store long term backups of my stuff, which I might add to incrementally, but never really change.

But Unison is for syncing, which means maintaining eventually consistent replicas of a changing directory tree (up to some pragmatic exceptions and manual tweaks). The whole point of Unison is to turn multiple devices into a single failure domain, which requires a separate system for storing safe backups.

We still use duplicity because it allows us to use our own rsync backup servers, has encryption, compression and par2 optional (defaults to 10%). Every one of these is optional. Too bad it doesn't offer the ability to use compression algorithms other than gzip (lzma or zstd would be nice).

restic isn't just for sftp, it supports bunch of cloud storages.

Also, open source but non free license but duplicacy, in my opinion is technically superior to restic.

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