My New Backup Setup with Kopia

content/posts/2022.05.29.my-new-backup-kopia.md

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+---
+title: "My New Backup Setup with Kopia"
+date: 2022-05-29T16:37:03-04:00
+draft: false
+toc: false
+images:
+tags:
+  - untagged
+---
+
+I've recently switched to [Kopia](https://kopia.io/) after having some trouble with Duplicati. There
+was some sort of issue with mono (the runtime used by Duplicati) not reading the
+certificate files on my system, and failing to authenticate the Backblaze B2
+connections. After most workarounds I read online not solving the issue, and the
+problem not being solved after months of waiting, I decided it might be time to
+check out some other backup solutions.
+
+## What I want from backup software
+
+There are some features that I think are crucial for backup software.
+
+- Incremental backups. These save massive amounts of space, and it's
+  non-negotiable in my opinion. I'm not going to waste space storing a hundred
+  duplicates of each file, any sane backup solution must be able to deduplicate
+  the data in the backups.
+- Client-side encryption. While I have some level of trust for the services I'm
+  backing up my data on, I don't trust them to not read through my data. Between Google implementing a [copyrighted material scanner](https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-uses-hash-matching-detect-pirated-content/) and the [said scanner going haywire](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-drive-flags-nearly-empty-files-for-copyright-infringement/), while I have nothing illegal in my backups I'd rather keep my data out of these services hands.
+- Compression is also important to me. A lot of the data on my computer that I
+  want to back up is stuff like code files, configuration files, game saves and
+  such. A lot of these files are not compressed well or at all, so compressing
+  the backed up data can be a major win in terms of space savings. Modern
+  processors can decompress data faster than disks can read or write them with
+  the right algorithms, so this usually comes at effectively no cost too. Of
+  course this may be less important for you if what you are trying to back up is
+  already compressed data like images, videos, and music files.
+- Being able to restore only some files or folders without doing a full restore.
+  Some services like Backblaze B2 charge you for data downloaded, so it's
+  important that if I'm only restoring a few files, I can do so without
+  downloading the entire archive.
+
+## Kopia
+
+Kopia checks all these boxes. Backups are incremental, everything is encrypted
+client side. Compression is supported and is configurable, and you can mount
+your backups to restore only a subset of files or read them without restoring.
+
+Something small that is amazing though is that Kopia can read `.gitignore` files
+to filter those files out of your backups! This is amazing as a developer
+because I already have gitignore files set up to ignore things like
+`node_modules` or project build directories, which I wouldn't care about backing
+up. Thanks to Kopia, these are immediately filtered out of my backups without
+any extra effort.
+
+## Are incremental backups and compression really worth it?
+
+Yes, absolutely! 
+
+Right now I have Kopia set up to back up my home directory, which contains about
+9.8GB of data after all excluding all the cache files, video games, and applying
+gitignores. I have 13 snapshots of this, which in total take up 4.9GB on disk.
+13 snapshots take less space than the entirety of my home directory!
+
+I have Kopia set up to use pgzip compression which seems to be the best option
+in terms of compression speed versus storage size.
+