Attic and other backup software

18 November 2014 software, backup, attic, btsync

As long as the rain keeps me indoors here in Florence, I’m reading my daily dose of Hackernews. A submission regarding Bup prompted people to mentions their preferred program to make backups. Requirements vary: trusted or nontrusted remotes (encryption), speed, bandwidth usage (deduplication), opensourcyness (will BTSync ever release source? Probably not).

Someone mentions Attic, which sounds like a very appealing option. In encrypts remotes by default, functions a bit like a vcs, and in particular like git, because it stores its index with file hashes, and then encrypts, so that incremental backups can still be made. This also means and quick integrity check of the local filesystem is possible, which is something I really like. Bitrot is a bitch. Any snapspot can be mounted through FUSE! Perusing the Issues and Pull requests on Github temper my enthusiasm a bit: seems like FUSE is slow, crashes not an exception (this terrifies me), and Windows support is still lacking, as with almost all of these tools. Stavros gives a nice taste of Attic, but unfortunately he doesn’t qualify ‘fast’.

So, I might check it out when I get back, but meanwhile I’ll stick to BTSync and storing and occasionally checking checksums manually. Syncthing is still not a thing with its laborious setup. One thing that turned up seems interesting: a tool that allows one to autosync filesystems through a dvcs. It uses a jabber service to coordinate. Could make any tool function like Dropbox/BTSync, in that it will require no manual pushing and pulling.

It surprises me that so few tools (only DVDisaster) integrate parity files to improve reliability. Knowing when bitrot attacks is half the battle, but fixing it without needing a backup or remote, that would be even better.