4.0 KiB
ZVault Backup solution
zVault is a highly efficient deduplicating backup solution that supports client-side encryption, compression and remote storage of backup data.
Main Features
Space efficient storage
Each file is split into a number of chunks. Content-defined chunking and chunk fingerprints make sure that each chunk is only stored once. The chunking algorithm is designed so that small changes to a file only change a few chunks and leave most chunks unchanged. Multiple backups of the same data set will only take up the space of one copy.
The deduplication in zVault is able to reuse existing data no matter whether a file is modified, stored again under a different name, renamed or moved to different folder.
That makes it possible to store daily backups without much overhead as backups with only small changes do not take up much space.
Also multiple machines can share the same remote backup location and reuse the data of each others for deduplication.
Performance
High backup speed is a major design goal of zVault. Therefore is uses different techniques to reach extremely fast backup speeds.
All used algorithms are hand-selected and optimized for speed.
Unmodified files are detected by comparing them to the last backup which makes it possible to skip most of the files in regular usage.
A blazingly fast memory-mapped hash table tracks the fingerprints of all known chunks so that chunks that are already in the repository can be skipped quickly.
In a general use case with a Linux system and a home folder of 50 GiB, backup runs usually take between 1 and 2 minutes.
Independent backups
All backups share common data in form of chunks but are independent on a higher level. Backups can be deleted and chunks that are not used by any backup can be removed.
Other backup solutions use differential backups organized in chains. This makes those backups dependent on previous backups in the chain, so that those backups can not be deleted. Also, restoring chained backups is much less efficient.
Data encryption
The backup data can be protected by modern and fast encryption methods on the client before storing it remotely.
Compression
The backup data can be compressed to save even more space than by deduplication alone. Users can choose between zlib (medium speed and compression), lz4 (very fast, lower compression), brotli (medium speed, good compression), and lzma (quite slow but amazing compression).
Remote backup storage
zVault supports off-site backups via mounted filesystems. Backups can be stored on any remote storage that can be mounted as a filesystem:
- NFS
- SMB / Windows shares
- SSH (via sshfs)
- FTP (via curlftpfs)
- Google Drive (via rclone)
- Amazon S3 (via rclone)
- Openstack Swift / Rackspace cloud files / Memset Memstore (via rclone)
- Dropbox (via rclone)
- Google Cloud Storage (via rclone)
- Amazon Drive (via rclone)
- Microsoft OneDrive (via rclone)
- Hubic (via rclone)
- Backblaze B2 (via rclone)
- Yandex Disk (via rclone)
- ... (potentially many more)
Backup verification
For long-term storage of backups it is important to check backups regularly. zVault offers a simple way to verify the integrity of backups.
Mount backups as filesystems
Backups can be mounted as a user-space filesystem to investigate and restore their contents. Once mounted, graphical programs like file managers can be used to work on the backup data and find the needed files.
Semantic Versioning
zVault sticks to the semantic versioning scheme. In its current pre-1.0 stage this has the following implications:
- Even now the repository format is considered pretty stable. All future versions will be able to read the current repository format. Maybe conversions might be necessary but the backups should always be forward-compatible.
- The CLI might see breaking changes but at least it is guaranteed that calls that are currently non-destructive will not become destructive in the future. Running todays commands on a future version will not cause any harm.