chocolatey.veeam-agent VS pass-import

My understanding is that full system backups on Windows requires the tool to create VSS snapshots and back up from the snapshot. Any tool that just copies files on the disk won't work.

I use Veeam Agent for this purpose (free, but not open source). It can do full system backups and supports both restoring to the same hardware and new hardware. Restores are done via a bootable WinPE-based image that the tool creates.

One cool thing about it I haven't seen in other backup software is that incremental backups work via a driver that tracks which disk blocks are changed as the system is running. It avoids the need to rescan the disk to detect what has been changed (though it will still do that if the filesystem is modified outside of Windows, eg. if dual booting).

The biggest downside is Veeam's website. It's pretty "enterprisey" and they want you to register to be able to download. I install via the Chocolatey package manager to avoid this. Chocolatey's package source has a direct link to the official installer [0].

There are no ads, nagging, nor upselling in the software itself. I have not seen it making any network connections outside of connecting to my backup target host and the auto-updates server.

I've been looking for open source alternative with a similar feature set, but haven't had too much luck. There's Bacula, but that seems to very much be designed for an enterprise use case.

[0] https://github.com/sbaerlocher/chocolatey.veeam-agent/blob/m...

> I always tell these people to just sign up for a password manager and they always resist and say no. I must be missing something obvious.

Maybe they don't want to be relying on a random third-party for all their passwords?

Rather than getting them to sign up for a password manager, what about getting them to install a password manager? I use https://www.passwordstore.org/ - it encrypts your passwords with GPG, and shares the storage via a Git repository for synchronisation between different machines.

That way you can delegate the password handling to another program, e.g. a password manager like pass(1) (https://www.passwordstore.org/) or some interactive graphical prompt.

I want to move to something compatible with https://www.passwordstore.org/ - an open standard for keeping your passwords in a folder encrypted with OpenPGP.

The problem is that I'm nervous to give an unknown Android app and browser plugin total control of my passwords and access to my github account when I don't have time to review it's code properly. I have a bit more trust ing the command line tools, but I'd like to be sure that more people are looking at the code before I trust my life to it.

> Create a system or pattern based on url or brand and mentally hash it into a password.

Doesn't sound very secure. Also when you realize that you anyway have to trust cryptography, I believe it starts making a lot of sense to have an actual cryptographic key and encrypt it with one good random password you learn by heart.

I use pass https://www.passwordstore.org/, which encrypts my passwords with my GPG key, which comes from my Yubikey, which I unlock with a password. That means that I only need to remember one password, and it feels a lot more secure than your pattern based on url or brand.

i use pass and keep my database on a local git repo. it encrypts your passwords with gpg and is a really simple command line program

If you want portability and simplicity, there's a project called simply pass that uses standard *nix utilities (and git, I believe) to manage passwords from CLI.

0. Pass is just text files encrypted with gpg. I needed just one password on one work computer, where I had my gpg key, but not all my passwords. Decrypted the file and that was it.

1. There are plugins and web clients: https://www.passwordstore.org/#extensions

I've been incredibly happy with https://www.passwordstore.org/ for years. The data store is a file hierarchy, with the files themselves encrypted with GPG. Sync is via git. TOTP support with a plugin.