Kopia – incremental backups, encryption, compression, data deduplication | Hacker News Reader

Kopia – incremental backups, encryption, compression, data deduplication

github.com

73 pointsthunderbong17 comments

Kopia does not 'image' your whole machine.

A real shame imaging is the time saving component if a system is not recoverable. People want to get their systems up and running as fast as possible.

A combination of imaging and file back up is the best way to do that. For now I'll stick with http://www.urbackup.org/

It takes 20minutes to reinstall an OS these days, and only 2 to boot a livecd from which you can start working if you need a system asap.

It is rare that you need all your apps installed and configured at the minute 0 in most people situations.

I contemplated using puppet or ansible a long time ago but realized later on that just synching the output of your package manager list (rpm -qa) + all your .config files in a repo combined + having all my ssh keys in a password manager was enough to reconstruct a system very quickly without the need of imaging.

You're right installing an OS is very fast and that's not the problem.

It's rare that people don't need their applications installed and configured after a recovery?

I completely disagree in this respect for a desktop OS with applications. People want their system exactly how it was before a catastrophic event. When do they want it? As soon as possible.

They don't always remember how it was configured but just expect the end result to be as it was before a recovery.

Using tools like Puppet and Ansible are needlessly complex for the everyday end user when a simple system restore from an image can get them back up and running.

Interesting, I was just about to setup a Time Machine server on my home media NUC server today (running Ubuntu) to automatically backup all family computers while on the network.

Would this be a better option than that? All of our important files are on iCloud already so this backup is slightly redundant, but I have spare external hard drives I could use for this so figured why not.

I use https://www.duplicati.com

Is Kopia better?

The advantage over Restic and Borg is error correction. Otherwise Restic and Borg do the same and are more tested.

What do you mean by error correction? In which sense does restic not do error correction?

If you flip a bit in some file in a restic or Borg repository, you will lose data (the amount of which depends on the location, possibly the repository is corrupted). With error correction, that bit flip is corrected by the software from parities.

Very cool that it does deduplication. It's a killer feature for Borg, as it saves me tonnes of money. If Kopia's dedup is as good as Borgs, then it's certainly worth looking at.

It's actually better.

Nice name and logo. Does anybody know if there is a such tool for video and photo?

Why would you want something specifically for photo/video when this solution can back up any file type or folder location?

Not the person who asked the question, but I'm guessing they might have a lot of the same photos and videos of different resolutions which would create files of different sizes.

There is and there isn't, in a sense that there's nothing better than general-purpose backup software. Media is almost always encoded in high-entropy formats thus negating any possible gains from incremental backups. So with common backup tools you only get data consistency checks and encryption, but almost no compression or intra-file deduplication, and to get that you need to reencode your media for storage, which is unfeasible, at least for now.

for phone backup I use immich, it's self hosted clone of Google photos. it's not best, does not work well with hdr photos/videos, but as just backup solution it have multiple ways to setup synchronization so you can choice your tradeoffs.

Is this a rip-off of Duplicacy?

Feature sets are almost identical to each other.

Seriously, why the down vote?

This project appears to match Duplicacy feature for feature.

I'm just asking a question, not trying to make a criticism.

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