Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

Author's here. A bit of a background on the project if I may.

I wrote the original version several years ago. It was purely for myself, to automate the way I was doing the backups at the time. I also threw together a website and put it online, just because and with no hope that something this simple would be in demand. Then went on doing other things like having kids and what not. Fast forward to 2012 and there's a couple of thousand people on the mailing list and a trickle of emails asking when an update would come out. So I sat down and did a proper rewrite. I thought it would take 2-3 months, but it took almost a year. And a half. The breadcrumbs of the process are over on the /wip page [1]. You might've seen it as it was on HN some time ago.

The app is notable for three things - (1) it has a single, simple purpose (2) it is light and very fast and (3) it has an excellent UI.

Also of some interest - I ran a 12-month long beta. Started with just 100 people testing private builds for 6 months and then moved on to a public beta for another 6, altogether yielding about 15,000 installs. If there's a single takeaway from the project so far - a beta this long is incredible. It helps shaping the feature set like nothing else and it flushes the most obscure bugs that no formal QA could ever find.

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By the way of introduction - I come from the system programming background. I spent several years writing firmware for network appliances, I wrote a P2P VPN system from scratch and I generally prefer C to Java if you know what I mean. I also get a major kick from doing visual design for my projects and got 2000 followers on Dribbble to prove it :)

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In any case, there you have it - my take on simple backup software. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

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[1] http://bvckup2.com/wip

There are backups and there are backups.

For some people, like yourself, archiving backup is the one true backup, while others make do with rolling hourly/daily/weekly backups or even something as rudimentary as copy-pasting folders by hand. Ideally, yes, everyone should be doing versioned backups to a zfs storage cluster. In practice, no, lots of people have just enough motivation to get an external drive and start making copies onto it.

That said, I am planning to add versioning and I am looking at adopting git's packfiles for that purpose. The idea basically is to use an open format for storing archived versions, so not to lock in the users. This is in its early stages, so it may or may not work out.

You do snapshots on your target.

Let's not go there. I wish I named it something else. It was a dorky name for a toy project, who'd knew it would get any traction.

Incidentally, I do own backvp.com.

Here's his Dribbble page: https://dribbble.com/apankrat

To the author: great work. I love your UI design.