🗃️ snapkup v0.3.2.1

Snapkup is a simple backup tool that takes snapshots of your filesystem (or the parts that you'll decide), storing them efficiently and conveniently.

Basic workflow

The basic flow is:

• You initialize an empty directory that will store the backups
• You register one or more backup roots, directory or files that will be snapshotted
• You take one or more snapshots. Snapkup lists all the tree for those roots, taking a copy of the contents
• You can restore the situation of the roots at any given snapshot
• Of course, it's possible to list roots and snapshots and delete any of them, and perform all the other admin ops

Notable points:

• Files are deduplicated: only one copy of a file is stored, across the filesystem and all the snapshots
• Everything stored on-disk is encrypted, using XChaCha20Poly1305
• Checksums, using authenticated 128-bit SipHash, are used to perform deduplication and integrity
• By default, everything is compressed using zstd -19. Incompressible files are stored as not compressed.
• Small files can be merged in "agglos", to reduce the number of files and make it more sync-friendly (e.g. for Dropbox)
• Snapkup favors features and code readability over speed. It's not slow, though!
• All paths are converted to absolute paths, for consistency.
• Cross-platform portability of backup archives is not a priority, though it should reasonably work.

Plans for the future:

• Ability to produce all outputs as JSON, for better script-ability
• Ability to retrieve files from external filesystems, via SSH
• Ability to back up data that come from the execution of a command (e.g. crontab -l)
• FUSE-mount a snapshot

Documentation

Please see the GitBook Documentation that sports a tutorial and the documentation for all the commands!

Status

Everything described in the documentation should work. It's still at an early stage of development, so don't trust it with any critical data, yet.

Next steps:

• Further unit testing
• Improve documentation
  • Document the on-disk layout of files, for external review
• Better error handling
• Better recovery of the data structures from errors
• Better/more convenient handling of passwords

Build

cd to the src/ dir and go build. On UNIX systems you can also use make build from the root.

It uses CGO, so cross-compilation comes with the usual caveats, and a proper build stack should be installed.