Obnam is an easy, secure backup program. Backups can be stored on local hard disks, or online via the SSH SFTP protocol. The backup server, if used, does not require any special software, on top of SSH.
Some features that may interest you:
- Snapshot backups. Every generation looks like a complete snapshot, so you don't need to care about full versus incremental backups, or rotate real or virtual tapes.
- Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations. If the backup repository already contains a particular chunk of data, it will be re-used, even if it was in another file in an older backup generation. This way, you don't need to worry about moving around large files, or modifying them. (However, the current implementation has some limitations: see dedup).
- Encrypted backups, using GnuPG.
See the tutorial, and below for links to the manual, which has examples of how to use Obnam.
Obnam can do push or pull backups, depending on what you need. You can run Obnam on the client, and push backups to the server, or on the server, and pull from the client over SFTP. However, access to live data over SFTP is currently somewhat limited and fragile, so it is not recommended.
Documentation
- The full manual (currently a work in progress): available as
a web page and
PDF.
- CI versions, built from git, but not yet released, are also available.
- The Obnam test suite is also meant to be useful for the more technical users of Obnam to read: web page, PDF.
- See also manuals built automatically from version control by Jan Niggemann: http://hz6.de/obnam-downloads/
- README (updated at release time)
- NEWS (updated at release time)
- obnam manual page
- FAQ
- Development stuff
Sponsored by Bytemark
Obnam development is partly sponsored by Bytemark by providing BigV virtual machines for development and benchmarking.
Sponsored by the FUUG foundation
The FUUG foundation gave a grant in September, 2015, for buying a fast machine with lots of disk space for development and benchmarking of Obnam.