Conclusion

There is a certain disparity between problems and features here: I personally can do without most of the features but do not like to live with the problems. Additionally, backup is a must have but also not something one gets in touch with often as the processes themselves are automated at least to the point that I as a user only call a script (e.g. connect USB drive, call script, disconnect). From that point of view, most of the tools’ advantages are largely uninteresting such as long as there are no problems!

This is an unfortunate situation with backup tools in general which may be one of the reasons why there are so few good tools to chose from :)

Without further delay, the following table summarizes the findings by recalling the greatest issues observed for the respective tools:

Tool Problems
Borg
– very slow especially for initial backups
   
JMBB
– very slow restore
  – no deduplication
  – no files above 8 GiB
   
Kopia
– no Unix pipes/special files support
  – large caches in Data-Test
  – rather large backup sizes
   
Bupstash
– large file numbers in single directory

My conclusion from this is that Bupstash is a most viable candidate. There are still some rough edges but given that it is the newest among the tools checked that can be expected.

Traditional backup tools can mostly be subdivided by the following characteristics:

• file-based vs. image-based
  Image-based solutions make sure everything is backed up, but are potentially difficult to restore on other (less powerful) hardware. Additionally, creating images by using traditional tools like dd requires the disk that is being backed up to be unmounted (to avoid consistency issues). This makes image-based backups better suited for filesystems that allow doing advanced operations like snapshots or zfs send-style images that contain a consistent snapshot of the data of interest. For file-based tools there is also a distinction between tools that exactly replicate the source file structure in the backup target (e.g. rsync or rdiff-backup) and tools that use an archive format to store backup contents (tar).

• networked vs. single-host
  Networked solutions allow backing up multiple hosts and to some extent allow for centralized administration. Traditionally, a dedicated client is required to be installed on all machines to be backed up. Networked solutions can act pull-based (server gets backups from the clients) or push-based (client sends backup to server). Single-Host solutions consist of a single tool that is being invoked to backup data from the current host to a target storage. As this target storage can be a network target, the distinction between networked and single-host solutions is not exactly clear.

• incremental vs. full
  Traditionally, tools either do an actual 1:1 copy (full backup) or copy “just the differences“ which can mean anything from “copy all changed files” to “copy changes from within files”. Incremental schemes allow multiple backup states to be kept without needing much disk space. However, traditional tools require that another full backup be made in order to free space used by previous changes.

Modern tools mostly advance things on the incremental vs. full front by acting incremental forever without the negative impacts that such a scheme has when realized with traditional tools. Additionally, modern tools mostly rely on their own/custom archival format. While this may seem like a step back from tools that replicate the file structure, there are numerous potential advantages to be taken from this:

• Enclosing files in archives allows them and their metadata to be encrypted and portable across file systems.

• Given that many backups will eventually be stored to online storages like Dropbox, Mega, Microsoft One Drive or Google Drive, the portability across file systems is especially useful. Even when not storing backups online, portability ensures that backup data can be copied by easy operations like cp without damaging the contained metadata. Given that online stores are often not exactly trustworthy, encryption is also required.

Abstract

This article attempts to compare three modern backup tools with respect to their features and performance. The tools of interest are Borg, Bupstash and Kopia.

BorgTUI -- A simple TUI and CLI to automate your Borg backups :^)

Can someone please help decide what is the "best" backup software?

• Restic (https://restic.net/)
• Borg backup (https://www.borgbackup.org/)
• Duplicati (https://www.duplicati.com/)
• Kopia (https://kopia.io/)
• Duplicay (https://duplicacy.com/)
• Duplicity (https://duplicity.us/)

mekster 79 days ago

Do yourself a favor and use zfs as your primary backup, even though it means you'll have to replace your filesystem, it's just that good.

Faster than any other backup software (because it knows what's changed from the last snapshot being the filesystem itself but external backup tools always have to scan the entire directories to know what's changed), battle tested reliability with added benefit like transparent compression.

A bit of explanation on how fast it can be than external tools. (I don't work for the said service in the article or promote it.)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/

Then you'll realize Borg is the one with least data corruption complaint on the internet which is good as your secondary backup.

Easily checked with, "[app name] data corruption" on Google.

And see who else lists vulnerability and corruption bugs upfront like Borg does and know the developers are forthcoming about these important issues.

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html

The term "best" apparently means reliable for backup and also they don't start choking on large data sets taking huge amount of memories and roundtrip times.

They don't work against your favorite S3 compatible targets but there are services that can be targeted for those tools or just roll your own dedicated backup $5 Linux instance to avoid crying in the future.

With those 2, I don't care what other tools exist anymore.

donmcronald 79 days ago

I use ZFS + Sanoid + Syncoid locally and Borg + Borgmatic + BorgBase for offsite.

WhrRTheBaboons 76 days ago

Seconding zfs

Linux-Fan 80 days ago

Bupstash (https://bupstash.io/) beats Borg and Kopia in my tests (see https://masysma.net/37/backup_tests_borg_bupstash_kopia.xhtml). It is a modern take very close to what Borg offers regarding the feature set but has a significantly better performance (in terms of resource use for running tasks, the backups were slightly larger than Borg's in my tests).

dpbriggs 79 days ago

Personally I use borg with BorgTUI (https://github.com/dpbriggs/borgtui) to schedule backups and manage sources/repositories. I'm quite pleased with the simplicity of it compared to some of the other solutions.