Back In Time VS Rdiff-backup

it is often asked by beginners how and where starting to contribute. As member of the maintenance team of Back In Time (Backup software using rsync in the back, written with Python and Qt) I would like to introduce one of our "good first issues" (#1578).

I'm member of the upstream maintenance team of Back In Time a rsync-based backup software. No one gets payed. No company behind hit. Even the maintainers and developers are volunteers.

Back In Time is a round about 15 years old backup software using rsync in the back. I'm part of the 3rd generation maintenance team there. A lot of work in investigating and fixing issues, understanding, documenting and refactoring old code.

This request is related to an Open Source project named Back In Time. Everyone there works voluntarily and unpaid.

In my own project we do it more transparent. We close if there is a good reason for it. We don't close just because no one is working on something. If there are no resources to work in it now but it seems important we keep it open until it is fixed. We do use milestones and priority labels to give the users an idea about our plans.

I'm member of the maintenance team of Back In Time a rsync-based backup software.

Most of the strings are form two past developers (the founder and the past maintainer). Since last summer we took over the project and try to clean things up. Some of the source strings just got a review from a linguist and he also mentioned about that exclamation marks. But he kind of stopped at some point because it was to much. ;)

Currently the translation is locked because of maintenance issues and an open PR offering review of original English strings.

Great and thanks. Feel free to ask further questions in the Issues section of our project or the bit-dev.python.org mailing list. Of course you can contact me directly here.

I'm interested in that topic because I'm member of the maintenance team of Back In Time, the software discussed in that video. The version in video is 0.9, today Back In Time reached 1.3.3. Also interesting is that I'm the third generation of maintainers to that project. I'm not sure but 0.9 there was the fist maintainer and founder involved only.

For starters it has a tendency to paint itself into a corner on ENOSPC situations. You won't even be able to perform a restore if a backup was started but unfinished because it ran out of space. There's this process of "regressing" the repo [0] which must occur before you can do practically anything after an interrupted/failed backup. What this actually must do is undo the partial forward progress, by performing what's effectively a restore of the files that got pushed into the future relative to the rest of the repository, which requires more space. Unless you have/can create free space to do these things, it can become wedged... and if it's a dedicated backup system where you've intentionally filled disks up with restore points, you can find yourself having to throw out backups just to make things functional again - even ability to restore is affected.

That's the most obvious glaring problem, beyond that it's just kind of garbage in terms of the amount of space and time it requires to perform restores. Especially restores of files having many reverse-differential increments leading back to the desired restore point. It can require 2X the file's size in spare space to assemble the desired version, while it iteratively reconstructs all the intermediate versions in arriving at the desired version. Unless someone fixed this since I last had to deal with it, which is possible.

Source: Ages ago I worked for a startup[1] that shipped a backup appliance originally implemented by contractors using rdiff-backup. Writing a replacement that didn't suck but was compatible with rdiff-backup's repos consumed several years of my life...

There are far better options in 2024.

[0] https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/src...

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/axcient

and that should install the latest version, rdiff-backup-2.2.4-2.el8.x86_64.rpm. This is all described in the rdiff-backup README file.

Rdiff-backup - close to what you do currently but at least provides versioning. Based on rsync

as in just a copy of your files? This I would barely consider a backup, more of just a mirror from a point in time. What're you missing by doing this? versions of files, deduplication, and encryption (last one being very important for the best kind of backups, which should be off-site). Just because it's not files doesn't mean it's proprietary. Proprietary would mean secret and undocumented. There are many great options. Borg is my favorite but Kopia is probably better if you use windows, urbackup is an option if you want centralized management of backups and rdiff-backup is if you want something kinda what you have currently but adding versioning but lacks deduplication and encryption.

If you're comfortable with the cli and you want to have your backup in a plain file format with some incremental backups, there's rdiffbackup. It uses rsync under the hood and has worked quite well for me.

Rdiff Backup - Reverse differential backups that uses rsync, linking, and can tunnel via ssh. You get a full current backup with increments available to restore any version of the file with minimal storage space used.

borg is great. we've been using it for the past 3 years to archive hundreds of file-level backups of servers, database dumps and VM images. average size of each borg repo is few GB but there are few outliers up to few hundreds of GB.

borg replaced https://rdiff-backup.net/ for us and gave:

Robocopy is great if you don't have access to rsync. If rsync via WSL2 for instance is an option, I'd personally go with rdiffbackup.