Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

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I can't find such tool for the love of me.

I'm ok to pay for it but:

1 - I need the client to use encryption and be open source

2 - It needs to run on linux

3 - It needs to backup files in arbitrary locations, including spanning several partitions (one NTFS, one ext3)

4 - It needs good filtering / curation capabilities

5 - Restore should have great granularity, and I should be able to browser the archive without having to unpack it all

6 - it needs to be easy to setup. I don't want to setup my own instance or mess with config files.

I've never found a tools that could do all that. One of those always fail, and sometimes the tool promise all of them, but doesn't even manage to backup. Some backup only partially, missing a files. Some backup, and don't restore. Some can only restore the all archive. Some don't encrypt. Some are close source, or only available on Mac and Linux. Some will store wrong files, and you can't them out of the backup.

It's crazy that in 2021, the state of backup sucks so much.

So have 2 backups on 2 different hard drives for all my files. One with "way back machine", the other one with a simple cp. Then I take essential files, and I put them on a usb drive.

My only remote backup are githup repo and emails.

Any suggestion?

You have a very particular list, so it's not at all surprising that you're having trouble finding something.

> It needs to run on linux

That right there is going to imply some level of knowledge from the user. Expecting a zero-config install for Linux is pushing it to begin with.

> It needs to backup files in arbitrary locations, including spanning several partitions (one NTFS, one ext3)

And

> It needs good filtering / curation capabilities

And

> it needs to be easy to setup. I don't want to setup my own instance or mess with config files.

Are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you want it to be powerful you'll need to do the work to configure it. If you don't want to do the work it's not going to meet your needs, period. No product exists that will meet all of these criteria, even for Windows. I don't think a product exists that would meet half of them, and certainly if it does it's not open source.

What you really want is rsync over SSH to a ZFS volume with encryption enabled, or some other CoW filesystem that lets you do snapshots and access them online.

If you want to get close, go buy a Synology NAS and set up a nightly rsync cron to it, then set it up to archive to AWS Glacier. That'll get you most of the way to your ideal, and it'll be done instead of perfect.

> Expecting a zero-config install for Linux is pushing it to begin with.

How so? Dropbox is zero config install for linux.

> Are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you want it to be powerful you'll need to do the work to configure it.

I never said zero config, I said easy to configure. Firefox has plenty of configuration nobs, but it's easy to configure it.

> What you really want is rsync over SSH to a ZFS volume with encryption enabled, or some other CoW filesystem that lets you do snapshots and access them online.

No because that's very complicated. I've done it in the past, and just the fact I have to manage a VPS to do so is more than what I want to do.

I've used rsync as well, it's again, too much scripting, meaning to much margin for errors.

Apple Time machine for linux is what I want, with remote capabilities.

You have Dropbox and it's no-config required. What's wrong with that? Is it that you have to configure it for it to do what you want, and you don't want to take the time to do so?

You don't want to set up a VPS, even though I mentioned nothing about one. I said to buy an appliance, same as a Time Capsule or whatever that Apple thing used to be called.

You think rsync+SSH+snapshot is complicated, but you don't know that Time Machine is exactly that, just hidden from you so if anything goes wrong it's a black box that you can't recover from.

You think rsync is too much scripting - what are you trying to do that requires scripting beyond `rsync -aP src dest`?

I use borg with rsync.net (and another host as a backup-backup). Works on linux. Backs up what I tell it to, I can mount any historical backup as a filesystem and copy stuff over. Uses encryption, is open source. You can point it to multiple backup locations for local and remote backups. Works for me. Takes about three minutes to do an incremental backup to two locations every evening.

I use Vorta, a GUI client for BorgBackup, together with rsync.net and it works rather well (besides Vorta being still far from polished).

I use Vorta with borgbase.com on my Mac. But borg has no native Windows support (only WSL). It clearly doesn't meet BiteCode_dev's requirements.

I get that you want what you want, but I gently note that I see quite often in FOSS circles people decide they need a laundry list of things unsatisfied by the available offerings and determine the field is a mess.

You've DQ'd the majority of backup services with your first requirement. You want what you want, but realize you're doing it.

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