Top 3 Python incremental-backup Projects

Rdiff-backup

32 1,038 8.5 Python

Reverse differential backup tool, over a network or locally.

Project mention: Duplicity | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-24

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

virtnbdbackup

3 270 9.3 Python

Backup utility for Libvirt / qemu / kvm supporting incremental and differential backups + instant recovery (agentless).

Project mention: virtnbdbackup: Backup utility for Libvirt / qemu / kvm supporting incremental and differential backups + instant recovery. | /r/coolgithubprojects | 2023-05-18

InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com sponsored

Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
cartridge-backup

1 2 10.0 Python

Script to make incremental backups onto multiple, smaller drives from one larger source

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).