Old article

Hello, it turned out that this article is obsolete. The security used in is not safe at all so the goal of this backup system isn’t achievable, thus it should not be used and I need another backup system.

One of the most important feature of dump for me was to keep track of the inodes numbers. A solution is to save the list of the inodes numbers and their path in a file before doing a backup. This can be achieved with the following command.

$ doas ncheck -f "\I \P\n" /var

If you need a backup tool, I would recommend the following:

Duplicity

It supports remote backend like ftp/sftp which is quite convenient as you don’t need any configuration on this other side. It supports compression and incremental backup. I think it has some GUI tools available.

Restic

It supports remote backend like cloud storage provider or sftp, it doesn’t require any special tool on the remote side. It supports deduplication of the files and is able to manage multiples hosts in the same repository, this mean that if you backup multiple computers, the deduplication will work across them. This is the only backup software I know allowing this (I do not count backuppc which I find really unusable).

Borg

It supports remote backend like ssh only if borg is installed on the other side. It supports compression and deduplication but it is not possible to save multiples hosts inside the same repository without doing a lot of hacks (which I won’t recommend).