Git-based backups with Kup
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© Lead Image © Rommel Canlas, 123RF.com
KDE's Kup tool uses Rsync and techniques from the Git version control environment for sophisticated backup with an easy GUI interface.
As soon as a user reports data loss, the first piece of advice is inevitably to restore from a backup. Almost as inevitably, this advice is often followed by a meek confession from the user that they do not have a bac kup and have never really thought about the concept.
As many users learn too late, backups are an essential part of the desktop computing experience. The hundreds of backup tools available today employ a wide range of strategies for preserving valuable data. An interesting approach is to use the Git version control environment for managing backups. The etckeeper [1] program, for instance, uses Git for monitoring configuration files in /etc/. One problem with this approach is that Git was developed to manage the Linux kernel, and it is designed to oversee large numbers of small files.
Virtual disks from virtual machines, however, quickly reach sizes of 10GB and more. Git uses the xdelta [2] algorithm to determine the differences between two files so that it only needs to store new data incrementally. However, xdelta performance degrades significantly with large files.
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