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by sureglymop 1034 days ago
Have a look at restic for a good alternative to this.
2 comments

Typical HN to immediately tell everyone to use something else when someone posts something they spent time and effort on making, just because it's not 100% unique
These alternative recommendations are exactly what I'm looking for when browsing the comments.
Author here. Yes, I am also the one that loves to see alternatives on topic of interest to me on HN. However putting an effort to publish different take on something already 'solved' is either because I want my own solution no matter what (I don't) or because other solutions didn't fully cover all my use cases (they didn't). I would gladly use somebody else code instead of my own, if that was possible.

Two scripts linked at the bottom of README.md are almost perfect and I used one or another for years, but one of them sometimes misses to hard link with previous backup, creating new full backup and wasting resources -- not something that's easy to detect since they all look correct before 'du' or similar analysis.

saf solves few of the problems I faced during the years in a elegant way: multiple targets, target related commands, reliability. Why not XY? Why not saf?

I didn't mean to detract from the post. I use both rsync and restic and this looks interesting. Just wanted to provide a recommendation for an alternative that does very similar things; I hope that's okay.
With me that's absolutely okay. We all need more choice and HN is a great way to learn about alternatives. Few nice things I borrowed from those two scripts mentioned in readme (credit given) wouldn't be possible without alternatives and open source.
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things." -- Theodore Roosevelt
Resric is great but the lack of empty passwords, and the response by the developer about it is very grating:

https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1786

He very politely said he thinks it’s better to keep the password requirement in place and was deciding to do that. What’s grating about that? Personally, I think his concern about users mistakenly not setting a password could be alleviated with an explicit —insecure flag, or similar.
This is the exact reason why I do not use restic.

This is a backup tool, not a security one. The fact that the author does not understand this is a real problem and a red flag.

It’s a good idea to enforce passwords for security. The features of backups done right are incremental backup, snapshot, deduplication, encryption and compression.