66 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
66 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "My New Backup Setup with Kopia"
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date: 2022-05-29T16:37:03-04:00
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draft: false
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toc: false
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images:
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tags:
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- untagged
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---
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I've recently switched to [Kopia](https://kopia.io/) after having some trouble with Duplicati. There
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was some sort of issue with mono (the runtime used by Duplicati) not reading the
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certificate files on my system, and failing to authenticate the Backblaze B2
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connections. After most workarounds I read online not solving the issue, and the
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problem not being solved after months of waiting, I decided it might be time to
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check out some other backup solutions.
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## What I want from backup software
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There are some features that I think are crucial for backup software.
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- Incremental backups. These save massive amounts of space, and it's
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non-negotiable in my opinion. I'm not going to waste space storing a hundred
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duplicates of each file, any sane backup solution must be able to deduplicate
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the data in the backups.
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- Client-side encryption. While I have some level of trust for the services I'm
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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.
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- Compression is also important to me. A lot of the data on my computer that I
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want to back up is stuff like code files, configuration files, game saves and
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such. A lot of these files are not compressed well or at all, so compressing
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the backed up data can be a major win in terms of space savings. Modern
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processors can decompress data faster than disks can read or write them with
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the right algorithms, so this usually comes at effectively no cost too. Of
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course this may be less important for you if what you are trying to back up is
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already compressed data like images, videos, and music files.
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- Being able to restore only some files or folders without doing a full restore.
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Some services like Backblaze B2 charge you for data downloaded, so it's
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important that if I'm only restoring a few files, I can do so without
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downloading the entire archive.
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## Kopia
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Kopia checks all these boxes. Backups are incremental, everything is encrypted
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client side. Compression is supported and is configurable, and you can mount
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your backups to restore only a subset of files or read them without restoring.
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Something small that is amazing though is that Kopia can read `.gitignore` files
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to filter those files out of your backups! This is amazing as a developer
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because I already have gitignore files set up to ignore things like
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`node_modules` or project build directories, which I wouldn't care about backing
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up. Thanks to Kopia, these are immediately filtered out of my backups without
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any extra effort.
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## Are incremental backups and compression really worth it?
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Yes, absolutely!
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Right now I have Kopia set up to back up my home directory, which contains about
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9.8GB of data after all excluding all the cache files, video games, and applying
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gitignores. I have 13 snapshots of this, which in total take up 4.9GB on disk.
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13 snapshots take less space than the entirety of my home directory!
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I have Kopia set up to use pgzip compression which seems to be the best option
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in terms of compression speed versus storage size.
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