1 bup: It backs things up
2 =======================
4 bup is a program that backs things up. It's short for "backup." Can you
5 believe that nobody else has named an open source program "bup" after all
8 Despite its unassuming name, bup is pretty cool. To give you an idea of
9 just how cool it is, I wrote you this poem:
12 What rhymes with awesome?
14 But that's irrelevant.
16 Hmm. Did that help? Maybe prose is more useful after all.
19 Reasons bup is awesome
20 ----------------------
22 bup has a few advantages over other backup software:
24 - It uses a rolling checksum algorithm (similar to rsync) to split large
25 files into chunks. The most useful result of this is you can backup huge
26 virtual machine (VM) disk images, databases, and XML files incrementally,
27 even though they're typically all in one huge file, and not use tons of
28 disk space for multiple versions.
30 - It uses the packfile format from git (the open source version control
31 system), so you can access the stored data even if you don't like bup's
34 - Unlike git, it writes packfiles *directly* (instead of having a separate
35 garbage collection / repacking stage) so it's fast even with gratuitously
36 huge amounts of data. bup's improved index formats also allow you to
37 track far more filenames than git (millions) and keep track of far more
38 objects (hundreds or thousands of gigabytes).
40 - Data is "automagically" shared between incremental backups without having
41 to know which backup is based on which other one - even if the backups
42 are made from two different computers that don't even know about each
43 other. You just tell bup to back stuff up, and it saves only the minimum
44 amount of data needed.
46 - You can back up directly to a remote bup server, without needing tons of
47 temporary disk space on the computer being backed up. And if your backup
48 is interrupted halfway through, the next run will pick up where you left
49 off. And it's easy to set up a bup server: just install bup on any
50 machine where you have ssh access.
52 - Bup can use "par2" redundancy to recover corrupted backups even if your
53 disk has undetected bad sectors.
55 - Even when a backup is incremental, you don't have to worry about
56 restoring the full backup, then each of the incrementals in turn; an
57 incremental backup *acts* as if it's a full backup, it just takes less
60 - You can mount your bup repository as a FUSE filesystem and access the
61 content that way, and even export it over Samba.
63 - It's written in python (with some C parts to make it faster) so it's easy
64 for you to extend and maintain.
67 Reasons you might want to avoid bup
68 -----------------------------------
70 - This is a very early version. Therefore it will most probably not work
71 for you, but we don't know why. It is also missing some
72 probably-critical features.
74 - It requires python >= 2.5, a C compiler, and an installed git
75 version >= 1.5.3.1. It also requires par2 if you want fsck to be
76 able to generate the information needed to recover from some types
79 - It currently only works on Linux, MacOS X >= 10.4,
80 NetBSD, Solaris, or Windows (with Cygwin). Patches to support
81 other platforms are welcome.
83 - Any items in "Things that are stupid" below.
93 - Check out the bup source code using git:
95 git clone git://github.com/bup/bup
97 - Install the required python libraries (including the development
100 On very recent Debian/Ubuntu versions, this may be sufficient (run
103 apt-get build-dep bup
105 Otherwise try this (substitute python2.5-dev or python2.6-dev if
106 you have an older system):
108 apt-get install python2.7-dev python-fuse
109 apt-get install python-pyxattr python-pylibacl
110 apt-get install linux-libc-dev
111 apt-get install acl attr
112 apt-get install python-tornado # optional
114 On CentOS (for CentOS 6, at least), this should be sufficient (run
117 yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
118 yum install python python-devel
119 yum install fuse-python pyxattr pylibacl
120 yum install perl-Time-HiRes
122 In addition to the default CentOS repositories, you may need to add
123 RPMForge (for fuse-python) and EPEL (for pyxattr and pylibacl).
125 On Cygwin, install python, make, rsync, and gcc4.
127 If you would like to use the optional bup web server on systems
128 without a tornado package, you may want to try this:
132 - Build the python module and symlinks:
140 (The tests should pass. If they don't pass for you, stop here and send
141 an email to bup-list@googlegroups.com.)
143 - You can install bup via "make install", and override the default
144 destination with DESTDIR and PREFIX.
146 Files are normally installed to "$DESTDIR/$PREFIX" where DESTDIR is
147 empty by default, and PREFIX is set to /usr. So if you wanted to
148 install bup to /opt/bup, you might do something like this:
150 make install DESTDIR=/opt/bup PREFIX=''
156 Binary packages of bup are known to be built for the following OSes:
159 http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&keywords=bup
161 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&keywords=bup
162 - pkgsrc (NetBSD, Dragonfly, and others)
163 http://pkgsrc.se/sysutils/bup
164 http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/sysutils/bup/
166 https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=bup
172 - Get help for any bup command:
181 - Initialize the default BUP_DIR (~/.bup):
185 - Make a local backup (-v or -vv will increase the verbosity):
188 bup save -n local-etc /etc
190 - Restore a local backup to ./dest:
192 bup restore -C ./dest local-etc/latest/etc
195 - Look at how much disk space your backup took:
199 - Make another backup (which should be mostly identical to the last one;
200 notice that you don't have to *specify* that this backup is incremental,
201 it just saves space automatically):
204 bup save -n local-etc /etc
206 - Look how little extra space your second backup used (on top of the first):
210 - Get a list of your previous backups:
214 - Restore your first backup again:
216 bup restore -C ./dest-2 local-etc/2013-11-23-11195/etc
218 - Make a backup to a remote server (which must already have the 'bup' command
219 somewhere in the server's PATH (see /etc/profile, etc/environment,
220 ~/.profile, or ~/.bashrc), and be accessible via ssh.
221 Make sure to replace SERVERNAME with the actual hostname of your server):
223 ssh SERVERNAME bup init
225 bup save -r SERVERNAME: -n local-etc /etc
227 - Restore a backup from a remote server. (FAIL: unfortunately,
228 unlike "bup join", "bup restore" does not yet support remote
229 restores. See both "bup join" and "Things that are stupid" below.)
231 - Defend your backups from death rays (OK fine, more likely from the
232 occasional bad disk block). This writes parity information
233 (currently via par2) for all of the existing data so that bup may
234 be able to recover from some amount of repository corruption:
238 - Use split/join instead of index/save/restore. Try making a local
241 tar -cvf - /etc | bup split -n local-etc -vv
243 - Try restoring the tarball:
245 bup join local-etc | tar -tf -
247 - Look at how much disk space your backup took:
251 - Make another tar backup:
253 tar -cvf - /etc | bup split -n local-etc -vv
255 - Look at how little extra space your second backup used on top of
260 - Restore the first tar backup again (the ~1 is git notation for "one
261 older than the most recent"):
263 bup join local-etc~1 | tar -tf -
265 - Get a list of your previous split-based backups:
267 GIT_DIR=~/.bup git log local-etc
269 - Make a backup on a remote server:
271 tar -cvf - /etc | bup split -r SERVERNAME: -n local-etc -vv
273 - Try restoring the remote backup tarball:
275 bup join -r SERVERNAME: local-etc | tar -tf -
277 That's all there is to it!
283 - FreeBSD's default 'make' command doesn't like bup's Makefile. In order to
284 compile the code, run tests and install bup, you need to install GNU Make
285 from the port named 'gmake' and use its executable instead in the commands
286 seen above. (i.e. 'gmake test' runs bup's test suite)
288 - Python's development headers are automatically installed with the 'python'
289 port so there's no need to install them separately.
291 - To use the 'bup fuse' command, you need to install the fuse kernel module
292 from the 'fusefs-kmod' port in the 'sysutils' section and the libraries from
293 the port named 'py-fusefs' in the 'devel' section.
295 - The 'par2' command can be found in the port named 'par2cmdline'.
297 - In order to compile the documentation, you need pandoc which can be found in
298 the port named 'hs-pandoc' in the 'textproc' section.
301 Notes on NetBSD/pkgsrc
302 ----------------------
304 - See pkgsrc/sysutils/bup, which should be the most recent stable
305 release and includes man pages. It also has a reasonable set of
306 dependencies (git, par2, py-fuse-bindings).
308 - The "fuse-python" package referred to is hard to locate, and is a
309 separate tarball for the python language binding distributed by the
310 fuse project on sourceforge. It is available as
311 pkgsrc/filesystems/py-fuse-bindings and on NetBSD 5, "bup fuse"
314 - "bup fuse" presents every directory/file as inode 0. The directory
315 traversal code ("fts") in NetBSD's libc will interpret this as a
316 cycle and error out, so "ls -R" and "find" will not work.
318 - There is no support for ACLs. If/when some entrprising person
319 fixes this, adjust t/compare-trees.
325 - There is no support for ACLs. If/when some enterprising person
326 fixes this, adjust t/compare-trees.
328 - In t/test.sh, two tests have been disabled. These tests check to
329 see that repeated saves produce identical trees and that an
330 intervening index doesn't change the SHA1. Apparently Cygwin has
331 some unusual behaviors with respect to access times (that probably
332 warrant further investigation). Possibly related:
333 http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-06/msg00436.html
339 - There is no support for ACLs. If/when some enterprising person
340 fixes this, adjust t/compare-trees.
349 bup stores its data in a git-formatted repository. Unfortunately, git
350 itself doesn't actually behave very well for bup's use case (huge numbers of
351 files, files with huge sizes, retaining file permissions/ownership are
352 important), so we mostly don't use git's *code* except for a few helper
353 programs. For example, bup has its own git packfile writer written in
356 Basically, 'bup split' reads the data on stdin (or from files specified on
357 the command line), breaks it into chunks using a rolling checksum (similar to
358 rsync), and saves those chunks into a new git packfile. There is at least one
359 git packfile per backup.
361 When deciding whether to write a particular chunk into the new packfile, bup
362 first checks all the other packfiles that exist to see if they already have that
363 chunk. If they do, the chunk is skipped.
365 git packs come in two parts: the pack itself (*.pack) and the index (*.idx).
366 The index is pretty small, and contains a list of all the objects in the
367 pack. Thus, when generating a remote backup, we don't have to have a copy
368 of the packfiles from the remote server: the local end just downloads a copy
369 of the server's *index* files, and compares objects against those when
370 generating the new pack, which it sends directly to the server.
372 The "-n" option to 'bup split' and 'bup save' is the name of the backup you
373 want to create, but it's actually implemented as a git branch. So you can
374 do cute things like checkout a particular branch using git, and receive a
375 bunch of chunk files corresponding to the file you split.
377 If you use '-b' or '-t' or '-c' instead of '-n', bup split will output a
378 list of blobs, a tree containing that list of blobs, or a commit containing
379 that tree, respectively, to stdout. You can use this to construct your own
380 scripts that do something with those values.
385 'bup index' walks through your filesystem and updates a file (whose name is,
386 by default, ~/.bup/bupindex) to contain the name, attributes, and an
387 optional git SHA1 (blob id) of each file and directory.
389 'bup save' basically just runs the equivalent of 'bup split' a whole bunch
390 of times, once per file in the index, and assembles a git tree
391 that contains all the resulting objects. Among other things, that makes
392 'git diff' much more useful (compared to splitting a tarball, which is
393 essentially a big binary blob). However, since bup splits large files into
394 smaller chunks, the resulting tree structure doesn't *exactly* correspond to
395 what git itself would have stored. Also, the tree format used by 'bup save'
396 will probably change in the future to support storing file ownership, more
397 complex file permissions, and so on.
399 If a file has previously been written by 'bup save', then its git blob/tree
400 id is stored in the index. This lets 'bup save' avoid reading that file to
401 produce future incremental backups, which means it can go *very* fast unless
402 a lot of files have changed.
405 Things that are stupid for now but which we'll fix later
406 ========================================================
408 Help with any of these problems, or others, is very welcome. Join the
409 mailing list (see below) if you'd like to help.
411 - 'bup restore' can't pull directly from a remote server.
413 So in one sense "save -r" is a dead-end right now. Obviously you
414 can use "ssh SERVER bup restore -C ./dest..." to create a tree you
415 can transfer elsewhere via rsync/tar/whatever, but that's *lame*.
417 Until we fix it, you may be able to mount the remote BUP_DIR via
418 sshfs and then restore "normally", though that hasn't been
421 - 'bup save' and 'bup restore' have immature metadata support.
423 On the plus side, they actually do have support now, but it's new,
424 and not remotely as well tested as tar/rsync/whatever's. However,
425 you have to start somewhere, and as of 0.25, we think it's ready
426 for more general use. Please let us know if you have any trouble.
428 Also, if any strip or graft-style options are specified to 'bup
429 save', then no metadata will be written for the root directory.
430 That's obviously less than ideal.
432 - bup is overly optimistic about mmap. Right now bup just assumes
433 that it can mmap as large a block as it likes, and that mmap will
434 never fail. Yeah, right... If nothing else, this has failed on
435 32-bit architectures (and 31-bit is even worse -- looking at you,
438 To fix this, we might just implement a FakeMmap[1] class that uses
439 normal file IO and handles all of the mmap methods[2] that bup
440 actually calls. Then we'd swap in one of those whenever mmap
443 This would also require implementing some of the methods needed to
444 support "[]" array access, probably at a minimum __getitem__,
445 __setitem__, and __setslice__ [3].
447 [1] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.bup/613
448 [2] http://docs.python.org/2/library/mmap.html
449 [3] http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#emulating-container-types
451 - 'bup index' is slower than it should be.
453 It's still rather fast: it can iterate through all the filenames on my
454 600,000 file filesystem in a few seconds. But it still needs to rewrite
455 the entire index file just to add a single filename, which is pretty
456 nasty; it should just leave the new files in a second "extra index" file
459 - bup could use inotify for *really* efficient incremental backups.
461 You could even have your system doing "continuous" backups: whenever a
462 file changes, we immediately send an image of it to the server. We could
463 give the continuous-backup process a really low CPU and I/O priority so
464 you wouldn't even know it was running.
466 - bup currently has no way to prune *old* backups.
468 Because of the way the packfile system works, backups become "entangled"
469 in weird ways and it's not actually possible to delete one pack
470 (corresponding approximately to one backup) without risking screwing up
473 git itself has lots of ways of optimizing this sort of thing, but its
474 methods aren't really applicable here; bup packfiles are just too huge.
475 We'll have to do it in a totally different way. There are lots of
476 options. For now: make sure you've got lots of disk space :)
478 Until we fix this, one possible workaround is to just start a new
479 BUP_DIR occasionally, i.e. bup-2013-10, bup-2013-11...
481 - bup has never been tested on anything but Linux, MacOS, and Windows+Cygwin.
483 There's nothing that makes it *inherently* non-portable, though, so
484 that's mostly a matter of someone putting in some effort. (For a
485 "native" Windows port, the most annoying thing is the absence of ssh in
486 a default Windows installation.)
488 - bup needs better documentation.
490 According to a recent article about bup in Linux Weekly News
491 (https://lwn.net/Articles/380983/), "it's a bit short on examples and
492 a user guide would be nice." Documentation is the sort of thing that
493 will never be great unless someone from outside contributes it (since
494 the developers can never remember which parts are hard to understand).
496 - bup is "relatively speedy" and has "pretty good" compression.
498 ...according to the same LWN article. Clearly neither of those is good
499 enough. We should have awe-inspiring speed and crazy-good compression.
500 Must work on that. Writing more parts in C might help with the speed.
504 Actually, that's not stupid, but you might consider it a limitation.
505 There are a bunch of Linux GUI backup programs; someday I expect someone
506 will adapt one of them to use bup.
512 bup has an extensive set of man pages. Try using 'bup help' to get
513 started, or use 'bup help SUBCOMMAND' for any bup subcommand (like split,
514 join, index, save, etc.) to get details on that command.
516 For further technical details, please see ./DESIGN.
522 bup is a work in progress and there are many ways it can still be improved.
523 If you'd like to contribute patches, ideas, or bug reports, please join the
526 You can find the mailing list archives here:
528 http://groups.google.com/group/bup-list
530 and you can subscribe by sending a message to:
532 bup-list+subscribe@googlegroups.com
534 Please see <a href="HACKING">./HACKING</a> for
535 additional information, i.e. how to submit patches (hint - no pull
536 requests), how we handle branches, etc.