zvault/README.md

ZVault Backup solution

Goals

• Blazingly fast backup runs
• Space-efficient storage
• Independent backups

Design

• Use rolling checksum to create content-dependent chunks
• Use sha3-shake128 to hash chunks
• Use mmapped hashtable to find duplicate chunks
• Serialize metadata into chunks
• Store small file data within metadata
• Store directory metadata to avoid calculating checksums of unchanged files (same mtime and size)
• Store full directory tree in each backup (use cached metadata and checksums for unchanged entries)
• Compress data chunks in blocks of ~10MB to improve compression ("solid archive")
• Store metadata in separate data chunks to enable metadata caching on client
• Encrypt archive
• Sort new files by file extension to improve compression

Configurable parameters

• Rolling chunker algorithm
• Minimal chunk size [default: 1 KiB]
• Maximal chunk size [default: 64 KiB]
• Maximal file size for inlining [default: 128 Bytes]
• Block size [default: 10 MiB]
• Block compression algorithm [default: Brotli 6]
• Encryption algorithm [default: chacha20+poly1305]

TODO

• Remove old data
• Locking / Multiple clients

Modules

• Rolling checksum chunker
  • Also creates hashes
• Mmapped hashtable that stores existing chunks hashes
• Remote block writing and compression/encryption
• Inode data serialization
• Recursive directory scanning, difference calculation, new entry sorting