Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfile format

Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by gcr on Saturday February 15, 2014 @05:19PM (#7245660)

Bup is lovely. I used it to back up my huge home folder and only switched away to rdiff-backup because (at the time) there was no support for deleting old revisions.

Is there any support for that? (Of course, for a large enough hard drive, it's not much of a problem...)

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by rlpb on Saturday February 15, 2014 @06:11PM (#7245885)

I wrote ddar, which is basically this but solves that particular problem, by using something other than the git packfile format.

http://www.synctus.com/ddar and http://github.com/basak/ddar

It's recently been made available on Homebrew, too.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by aristidb on Sunday February 16, 2014 @04:45AM (#7247159)

Nice. Could you add some description there how the deduplication works? I assume it uses rolling checksums to create chunk boundaries, just like bup?

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by rlpb on Sunday February 16, 2014 @12:07PM (#7248283)

> I assume it uses rolling checksums to create chunk boundaries, just like bup?

That's right.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by rakoo on Saturday February 15, 2014 @06:26PM (#7245949)

I don't see a link to the source code on your page, is it just me ?

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by rlpb on Saturday February 15, 2014 @08:26PM (#7246255)

See my github link for the latest source. The other page predates me uploading to github, so there's only a tarball source download from there. I should move everything over to github now, really.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by raphinou on Sunday February 16, 2014 @05:10AM (#7247204)

How actively is it developed? How reliable is it currently?

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by rlpb on Sunday February 16, 2014 @12:06PM (#7248279)

> How actively is it developed?

It's a simple tool that does a simple job. It's pretty much done.

> How reliable is it currently?

No known bugs.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by apenwarr on Saturday February 15, 2014 @05:58PM (#7245843)

People have been actively working on a "prune" feature but it seems to never quite get finished. This would indeed be nice to have, although it's less important than you might think, given really good deduplication (which bup has). Currently bup has a very simple model - never delete anything - which is hard to screw up, so you're very unlikely to lose data.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by bambambazooka on Monday February 17, 2014 @05:19AM (#7251369)

I really have to finish that feature...

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by jitl on Saturday February 15, 2014 @05:27PM (#7245702)

Looking at the README under "Stuff that is stupid":

  > bup currently has no way to prune old backups

Thanks for the rdiff-backup shout-out. I'm looking for a nice way to do system backups to my NAS of large VM images without having to install Crashplan. Bup and rdiff-backup both look pretty good.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by gcr on Sunday February 16, 2014 @10:21AM (#7247831)

Obnam is also great: http://liw.fi/obnam/

This does deduplication, but can also encrypt the deduplicated blocks and store them on (say) S3.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by luxpir on Monday February 17, 2014 @04:09AM (#7251210)

Obnam can also push/pull backups over SSH/SFTP. Seconded.

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Re:Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfi... by bambambazooka on Monday February 17, 2014 @05:21AM (#7251375)

I've been working on that feature for some time. I'll try to finish it for the next release! If you want to test my existing code contact me.

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