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A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

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Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#21
post #17

The results don't look very complete seeing as how attic was abandoned over two years ago. The master attic branch[0] has 600 commits. The fork of attic, borg, has over 4000 commits [1] suggesting a significant amount of work has been done to improve it. It seems odd for the author to compare it to something abandoned (and thankfully reborn as borg) and ignore what has happened in two years. Would love to see similar…

Author here. The experiments actually ran BorgBackup 1.1.0b6 as you can see from the Setup section. We liked to call it Attic out of the respect to the original Attic author.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#23
post #17

The results don't look very complete seeing as how attic was abandoned over two years ago. The master attic branch[0] has 600 commits. The fork of attic, borg, has over 4000 commits [1] suggesting a significant amount of work has been done to improve it. It seems odd for the author to compare it to something abandoned (and thankfully reborn as borg) and ignore what has happened in two years. Would love to see similar…

Author here. The experiments actually ran BorgBackup 1.1.0b6 as you can see from the Setup section. We liked to call it Attic out of the respect to the original Attic author.

You realize the name Borg comes from the Attic author, Jonas Borgström, right? No one else calls it Attic as the two are different projects.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of Duplicacy here. To personal users, it is free software.

It doesn't meet the free software foundation's definition of free software, which I believe was the original point. It lacks the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE...

The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would.

I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around redefining the English language willy nilly and expect people to play along.

Languages do evolve naturally but this isn't natural. This is an organization trying to influence the language to advance an agenda (though I believe it to be a worthy agenda, it's still an agenda).

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#25
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use borg (attic fork) backing up to rsync.net for my home server. All my machines back up locally to that machine (mostly using SyncThing), then it backs itself up every hour or so. It's not perfect but it does work really rather well. Borg is really nice, and rsync.net is of that variety of service that are always my favourites: it does one thing very well. Also they offer a discount if you use borg or attic (poss…

How much data and what's your monthly cost? I have a 2TB storage VPS for under $10/month. rsync.net looks very good but is possibly total overkill for my needs. Definitely don't need >1 snapshot/day as that's what my hourly local backup is for.

Can I ask where you got the VPS? That's a really great price for 2TB!

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The experiments actually ran BorgBackup 1.1.0b6 as you can see from the Setup section. We liked to call it Attic out of the respect to the original Attic author.

You realize the name Borg comes from the Attic author, Jonas Borgström, right? No one else calls it Attic as the two are different projects.

I noticed that, but didn't know if Borg has another meaning. I can understand why they forked the project, but in my opinion a name that makes the origin more obvious would have been better.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#27
> duplicity has a serious flaw in its incremental model -- the user has to decide whether to perform a full backup or an incremental backup on each run. That is because while an incremental backup saves a lot of storage space, it is also dependent on previous backups due to the design of duplicity, making it impossible to delete any single backup on a long chain of dependent backups. So there is always a dilemma of how often to perform a full backup for duplicity users.

Yes and no. Duplicity has the "--full-if-older-than" option so you can do incrementals normally, but if your previous full is older than whatever interval you define, it will do a full backup, without changing the command line. So that can be e.g. in a cron job.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#28
post #24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't meet the free software foundation's definition of free software, which I believe was the original point. It lacks the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE...

The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would. I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around red…

"It's a shame Duplicacy is not free software."

If the commenter meant no cost it's more reasonable they'd have said "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free". Or "It's a shame Duplicacy costs money".

Capitalising would have made it clearer yes, but I think given the language and the context (hacker news) I was justified. But the author, @acrosync, was also justified in assuming it meant no cost.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#29
post #4

Has anyone run these on their computer? As they noted, they are the author of Duplicacy.

I used to use attic to backup my personal Debian systems, since upgrading to the new stable (Stretch) release it is no longer available, so I switched to borg.

I had to juggle a few things around, but it works well. As does obnam, which I use in a couple of other places too.

Re: A performance comparison of Duplicacy, restic, Attic, and duplicity

#30
post #28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would. I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around red…

"It's a shame Duplicacy is not free software." If the commenter meant no cost it's more reasonable they'd have said "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free". Or "It's a shame Duplicacy costs money". Capitalising would have made it clearer yes, but I think given the language and the context (hacker news) I was justified. But the author, @acrosync, was also justified in assuming it meant no cost.

Free or not free aside, my question is, does it matter to personal users between this free-for-personal-use license and any of those more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL?
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