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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Maintaining local, off-line backups is an endless PITA.

But consider the alternative... :(

Posting this here, hoping desperately for someone to give me an example proving I'm wrong:

It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)".

Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want this folder to be backed up to here, here, and here". I can do that manually for every folder I want backed up, but other users may opt to backup a whole drive or whatever, depending on need.

Seems like a slam dunk. Frustrating that I don't know enough about the footguns with backups (duplications, cpu limiting, etc) to just write the app myself, but I have been looking at what the eframe and rustic libraries can do together. Feels imminently do-able by someone who has a lot of experience with backups. But maybe it's even passable do-able by someone who just knows what he wants.

You want Time Machine and a WD Passport.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

I appreciate the recc, but it misses the mark I think? Time machine is only on a single OS, and is designed as more of a "keep my whole system safe" backup rather than a "back these things up" backup.

I can understand why people might want to backup entire drives, or to backup OS content minimally, but my use-case is to just pick a few folders and only have those backed up. Not to an external drive, but to internal ones and network ones.

That's the tool I'm looking for. While Time Machine can exclude everything but the folders to backup, it doesn't seem to be able to back them up with different cadences or rules about content limits or whatever else. It's all or nothing. I'm just not sure it provides what I'm looking for.

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Sweet! Sounds easy. If someone could wrap that up in a GUI that works on all OSes, that seems like it would solve my problem!

yeah! like some kind of virtual box you can drop your files into...

Would Syncthing fulfill your requirements?

I think it might! Definitely checks enough boxes for me to try out, anyway.

The UI is a little cumbersome for me, personally, but it does seem at least straightforward enough for me to understand what the intentions are.

ETA: Welp, that didn't last long. A service running in the background that exposes an "insecure" url for a browser to then open as the only means for GUI interaction with the app is not a great recommendation for everyday users. It looks like it has all the features, but I'm looking for a user experience. CLIs provide the features. I'd like an app, not a service running a webserver. Shudder the thought of just shoving the front end in an electron app, but even that would be better than this for casual users.

You could create an app that has a tray status icon, that launches a tauri app connected to the same web service (assuming it's only listening on localhost, it's fine).

The main question is who is in control not whether it is off or online. Microsoft obviously thinks that users are not, and it is Microsoft. We should have been more careful with embracing the walled gardens.

Tbh I don't understand why 'Microsoft thinks that users are not' maybe because my kids are not logged in to onedrive yet. Do I understand correctly that MS tricks the users somehow to synchronize folders with cloud?

Kind of... you now have to sign into windows with a Microsoft Account, that has a starting (free) tier OneDrive, that will "easily" enable and start operations against directories you may not recognize are syncing, and even if disabled may change with automatic forced updates... it will then start nagging you to create a paid account for more storage, etc... otherwise tie you into Office products, where it starts saving to OneDrive by default, which you may not recognize and that doesn't even get into a lot of the dark patterns and manipulation.

FTR, I've used it and usually configure to explicitly only sync a single directory.

isn't there some powershell/magic command to disable sync at all? or you are forced to sync one directory?

For "off-line backups", I'm thinking air gapped. Or on a backup server running no MS software, and using a filesystem with frequent & reliable snapshots.

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