A good backup tool is like a dishwasher: It's not something most of us get excited about, but the degree to which it improves our daily lives is hard to overstate. And like with a dishwasher, no one really wants to spend time attending to a backup tool. Ideally, you'd want to set it up once and let it do its job with the push of a button or have it perform backups automatically, with no user interaction whatsoever.

Picking the right backup tool is not as trivial as choosing a dishwasher, though. Sure, you can whip up a simple shell script that backs up data to a different storage device using good old rsync. But in this day and age, it's simply not enough. If you're serious about keeping your data safe, you want to use a tool that supports incremental backups, deduplication, snapshots, and other useful features. For an offsite backup, you definitely want your backup tool to support mainstream storage services and encryption. On top of that, it wouldn't hurt if all of this were wrapped in a user-friendly interface.

It may sound like a pipe dream, but that's exactly what Kopia [1] has to offer. Plus, this cross-platform tool features a built-in web server and a dedicated desktop graphical application. And it goes without saying that you can use Kopia from the command line. In short, it's pretty much a perfect tool for keeping your data safe.

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