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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Any comparisons to Restic? Looks like basically the same thing but with a GUI available.

Edit: Found this very ad-hoc "benchmark" from over a year ago claiming that Kopia managed significantly better deduplication than Restic after several backups (what took Restic 2.2GB, Kopia did in <700MB). No idea if the advantage falls off outside of this particular benchmark, but if it doesn't then that's a pretty big improvement. https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/1809#issuecomment-1067...

Edit Edit: Never mind, this benchmark was from before Restic supported compression, which is the why its size is so much larger. Feels like that should have been mentioned.

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Restic only (relatively) recently implemented compression so I'd run my own tests before making a decision. I'm currently thinking about migrating off borg to restic and disk space usage is very similar based on my testing.

One thing I will mention is that other backup projects have switched from Restic to Kopia. Velero from VMware comes to mind.

UX is very important for backups (considering that users can be very lazy, so the least friction, the better), so a GUI is an important component; those who don't care about UX surely have infinite ways to perform their backups.

My dealbreaker with Restic was near-realtime backup - the discussion has been open for 5 years now: https://forum.restic.net/t/continuous-backup/593); this is also a UX problem. I haven't checked if Kopia supports it (or has better support, anyway), though.

That link is corrupted. HN thinks the ");" is part of it:

https://forum.restic.net/t/continuous-backup/593

> Kopia managed significantly better deduplication

> ... was from before Restic supported compression, which is the why its size is so much larger

deduplication != compression...

So we don't actually know which has better deduplication? Compression algorithms are well-established and you can find a million people who benchmarked them all for different purposes, but deduplication algorithms I never saw a comparison of. I don't even know if these things have proper names or if people just refer to them as "rsync-like"

I just switched over to Kopia as I was not entirely happy with restic, and so far one feature that actually got me by surprise is that Kopia supports reading .gitignore files! So you can tell it to back up your projects folder and it will automatically respect whatever each project has in gitignore. Now that may be possible with restic, but I spent way more time trying to configure scripts and yaml files than actually running backups there.. The GUI does help!

I'd be interested in comparison with:

https://relicabackup.com/features

https://github.com/netinvent/npbackup

Which is my current short-list for cross platform backup...

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