0.1.8-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64 and Linux (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, amd64).

• own-backup-install_0.1.8-beta.exe — Windows setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.
• own-backup_0.1.8.beta_amd64.deb — Linux package: sudo apt install ./own-backup_0.1.8.beta_amd64.deb installs the program, starts its service and adds you to the own-backup group (sign in again to open the window).
• OwnBackup-Linux-0.1.8.beta_amd64.iso — Linux boot medium (Debian 13 live): boots from a CD or a USB stick, UEFI with Secure Boot or BIOS, to back up or restore the computer's disks, Windows ones included.

Added

• Windows: Linux partitions in Total Commander. A file system plugin shows the files of this computer's Linux partitions — ext2/3/4 and btrfs, also inside LVM and LUKS encryption (an Ubuntu installed with disk encryption) — read-only, in place: nothing is attached, and the other partitions of the same disk stay in use. Total Commander asks for the encryption passphrase. btrfs is shown the way the system sees it after boot, by its /etc/fstab (@ is the root, @home is \home); compressed files (zstd, zlib, LZO) are read as they are. The installer puts the plugin's archive into C:\Program Files\OwnBackup\TotalCommander\OwnBackup-TC-plugin.zip: opened in Total Commander, it installs the plugin. The service does the reading, so it must be running.
• Linux boot medium: the keyboard layout indicator on the taskbar. When the medium is built in the Linux window, the "Tools just in case" box, as for the Windows medium, adds the Krusader file manager and the FeatherPad editor (the ready ISO from GitHub has neither).

Fixed

• The service no longer waits forever, when it is stopped, for a client that keeps its connection open without answering (Total Commander with the plugin): the installer hung on "Stopping the Own Backup service". Open connections now get 3 seconds to close.

Changed

• Release files carry the version in their names: own-backup-install_0.1.8-beta.exe, own-backup_0.1.8.beta_amd64.deb, OwnBackup-Linux-0.1.8.beta_amd64.iso. The release package has no Debian revision (0.1.8~beta); the window still finds the media of earlier releases, named with one.

Windows: settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not. Linux: settings and jobs in /var/lib/own-backup, the log in journald (journalctl -u own-backup).

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksums of the files are in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.7-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64 and Linux (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, amd64).

• own-backup-install.exe — Windows setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.
• own-backup_0.1.7.beta-1_amd64.deb — Linux package: sudo apt install ./own-backup_0.1.7.beta-1_amd64.deb installs the program, starts its service and adds you to the own-backup group (sign in again to open the window).
• OwnBackup-Linux-0.1.7.beta-1_amd64.iso — Linux boot medium (Debian 13 live): boots from a CD or a USB stick, UEFI with Secure Boot or BIOS, to back up or restore the computer's disks, Windows ones included.

Added

• Windows: the ready Linux boot medium. The "Based on Linux (Debian) x64" card is no longer "in development": the window downloads the boot medium ISO of its own version from the GitHub release, checks it against SHA256SUMS.txt and saves it without replacing an existing file (to Downloads by default). Writing it onto a USB stick is not in the Windows window yet — use Rufus in DD mode.
• Queued instead of refused. An action that needs only its own resources — verifying, exporting or deleting backups, building the boot medium, writing a stick — now waits its turn when they are busy (for example, verifying a backup while another job writes into the same folder). The window shows "Queued: … — starts when … ends" with a Cancel button. An action on the whole machine (restore, a drive letter) is still refused with the reason.
• History in the window's language. The notes of a run (why files were not listed, why excluded entries stayed in the image, what moved in the partition layout) are stored in both languages, and the window shows them in its current language. Runs recorded earlier are shown as recorded.
• User documentation in English and Russian (doc/).

Fixed

• The end of a backup no longer hangs on a stuck device: attaching and detaching the image to delete excluded entries now gives up after 5 minutes each. The image then keeps the excluded entries zeroed, and the result says so.
• When Windows cannot give memory for the disk read buffer, the service says that the system ran out of memory and how much was asked for, instead of "aligned buffer allocation failed".
• After a language switch the window asks the service again for the disks, the jobs and the history, so partition labels and run notes no longer stay in the old language until the window is reopened.
• Linux: a backup read from an LVM or device-mapper snapshot is no longer called a "VSS snapshot" (the window, the Activity page, the command line).
• The boot medium card on Windows 11 compared the medium with Windows build 9200: the real build is now read (RtlGetVersion).
• Run notes in Activity wrap between words, not inside them.
• Windows: when the log mirror on a USB stick (or another disk) grew past 4 MB, the previous log was moved into the service's own folder (System32) instead of staying beside the new one as .log.old.
• A release has one checksum list, SHA256SUMS.txt, for all its files.
• The zstd compression library (qcow2 and OBK) is updated to 0.14.3, which fixes the security advisories RUSTSEC-2026-0391, -0398, -0403 and -0410 and the unsound APIs reported with them.

Windows: settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not. Linux: settings and jobs in /var/lib/own-backup, the log in journald (journalctl -u own-backup).

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksums of the files are in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.6-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64 and Linux (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, amd64).

• own-backup-install.exe — Windows setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.
• own-backup_0.1.6.beta-1_amd64.deb — Linux package: sudo apt install ./own-backup_0.1.6.beta-1_amd64.deb installs the program, starts its service and adds you to the own-backup group (sign in again to open the window).
• OwnBackup-Linux-0.1.6.beta-1_amd64.iso — Linux boot medium (Debian 13 live): boots from a CD or a USB stick, UEFI with Secure Boot or BIOS, to back up or restore the computer's disks, Windows ones included.

Added

• Linux version. A .deb package for Ubuntu 24.04+ and Debian 13+ (amd64) with the same service, window and command line as on Windows. It backs up volumes and whole disks with ext4, XFS, btrfs, NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT, including LVM (every logical volume of a physical volume in one snapshot) and open LUKS containers (read through a device-mapper snapshot, the container header kept in the copy). Full, incremental and differential chains in VHDX, qcow2 and encrypted OBK; exclusions that really remove the files on ext4, XFS, btrfs and FAT, and on NTFS through ntfs-3g. The service key store uses systemd-creds (with the TPM 2.0 when there is one). A volume or a whole disk is restored through the service, with the choice to give the restored file systems, LUKS containers and volume groups new identities (UUIDs, labels, initramfs rebuilt) when the originals are still on the machine. The Boot page edits UEFI boot entries; the window has a tray icon and starts with the session. The service runs under systemd, asks polkit before destructive actions and logs to journald and a file.
• Backups are interchangeable between Windows and Linux, VHDX chains included: a copy made on one system opens, validates and restores on the other.
• Linux boot medium. A Debian 13 live ISO with the program on a labwc desktop with our own taskbar; it boots with UEFI (Secure Boot through Debian's signed shim) and BIOS, from a CD or a USB stick, and restores Windows copies as well as Linux ones. The window builds it from the installed package or downloads the ready one of the same version from the release, and writes it onto a USB stick.
• The boot medium card lets you choose a Winre.wim by hand (for example one taken from a Windows installation image). The service reads it first and refuses an installation image, a split or non-x64 image with the reason; a build given such a file is refused the same way.

Fixed

• An unfinished VHDX or qcow2 image of a run whose service was killed is now deleted when the service starts again (or at the next run, if the backup disk was not connected). The service records each such file in its protected folder before writing it, so only files it has proved its own are deleted. Leftovers of earlier versions and of runs outside the service stay where they are.
• The FAT boot image inside the medium's ISO keeps long names (EFI\Microsoft, boot.stl) instead of cutting them to 8.3.
• The empty part of the compression slider follows the theme.
• A job or history save that fails (for example on a full disk) no longer leaves a half-written temporary file holding the space.
• The window and the service exchange messages up to 64 MB: a job list past 4 MB (very long exclusion lists) no longer breaks every request.
• A source volume keeps its chain when it is named differently: by a new drive letter, its volume GUID path or a mount point. It used to start a new full copy, because the chain was matched by the name in the file name.
• A mount point (C:\Mount\Data) works as a source: it is read as the volume mounted there, its images are named by that volume, and a destination elsewhere on C: is no longer refused as "the same volume".
• A ReFS volume inside BitLocker is copied with its used-block map and its exclusions applied, locked or unlocked. It used to fail: under BitLocker ReFS ends before the device does, the cluster size could not be derived, and the sector-by-sector fallback hit the unreadable tail.
• A job remembers the folders it wrote into before its destination was changed, and deleting the job deletes its copies there too — even after the activity journal (200 runs) has forgotten that folder.
• A chain never grows past 60 images: the next run starts a new full copy whatever the scheme. A job of "only increments" without consolidation (saved before the modes existed, or made outside the window) used to grow past what the VHDX reader follows (64), after which every new copy was unreadable and retention stopped.
• XFS: every excluded file is now truly removed (1403 of 1403 on the test corpus, was 1369). A directory data block that would be left empty is taken out of the directory and returned to free space, as the kernel does, and is zeroed so the deleted names do not stay behind.
• The service restarts by itself after a crash (in 10 s, then 1 and 5 min). It used to stay stopped until the next reboot, and scheduled copies with it.
• A whole-disk restore keeps the partitions that are not in the backup, on Windows and on Linux. It used to rewrite the partition table from the backup alone.
• Restoring a disk keeps the boot code in LBA 0 (MBR) when the partition table is rewritten; on Linux the sectors after it (GRUB's core.img) stay too.
• NTFS exclusions cover named streams (Zone.Identifier and others) and content stored inside the MFT record. A file with many names or streams, whose record continues in extension records, no longer drops out of the exclusions entirely.
• qcow2: after consolidation the old bytes of replaced clusters are wiped, so excluded content does not survive in dead clusters.
• A backup interrupted because the service was stopped or killed is recorded as interrupted, and the schedule runs it again.
• The service no longer does one thing at a time for the whole machine: a restore is still exclusive, but copies, checks and mounts of different backup folders and the boot medium build run side by side; a scheduled check gives way to an action of a person on the same folder.
• A scheduled whole-disk backup with an encrypted partition needs the saved password only for that partition (ESP and /boot next to LUKS used to make every run skip), and a skipped run is shown under Activity.
• The end of a backup no longer waits forever behind a hung device: each VSS step has a time limit, and the window says "releasing the volume snapshot" or "opening the finished backup" instead of "flushing the cache".
• The result says how many excluded files an ext4, XFS or btrfs volume kept under their names with their contents zeroed.
• Validating an image under Tools keeps its progress bar and result when you leave the page and come back.
• On Windows the service writes the settings and the service data folder is open only to SYSTEM and administrators.
• Error messages no longer start with an English prefix.
• Dependencies: tokio past an I/O-safety flaw (RUSTSEC-2026-0386), Vite past advisories of its development server, and zbus 6 instead of the unmaintained zvariant crates; the Linux taskbar calls libgtk-layer-shell directly instead of its archived Rust bindings.

Windows: settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not. Linux: settings and jobs in /var/lib/own-backup, the log in journald (journalctl -u own-backup).

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksums of the files are in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.5-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64.

• own-backup-install.exe — setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.

Added

• Tools assign and remove drive letters of hidden system partitions (EFI, recovery) and show the disk model.
• When writing to the backup disk stops moving — a failing or disconnected disk that answers with errors — the job panel says so after two minutes. Cancelling such a run works and frees the queue even while the write itself hangs; the unfinished file publishes nothing.
• The job panel says that the source is an encrypted volume and that the copy holds it decrypted, with a warning when the copy is not encrypted.
• The full license texts of all third-party components are installed next to the program (THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt).

Changed

• The boot medium's taskbar speaks the language of Windows from the start.
• The EFI partition scan tells Acronis loaders apart and recognises the program's own boot environment.

Fixed

• VHDX and qcow2 are written under a private name and get their real one only when finished. A service stopped while excluded files were being deleted used to leave a half-made image that looked like a finished version and became the parent of the next increment, and after such a crash old copies of that job stopped being cleaned up.
• After an interrupted exclusion pass in an OBK, the next run also removes its scratch file.
• A run that could not be written into the program's history is marked on the job panel and written before the next run.
• Exclusions work again on XFS made by mkfs.xfs 6.x (nrext64) — such volumes used to be copied without them. True removal on XFS no longer backs off from the reverse-mapping tree: on the test set it deletes 1369 of 1403 files instead of 172.
• Restoring from a new boot medium brings back the boot loader of an older Windows too.
• Restoring on the medium no longer says the disk is not connected before the password is entered, nor warns about another machine because of the WinPE machine name.
• Without WebView2, the installed program advises installing the runtime rather than rebuilding the boot medium.

Settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not.

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksum of the file is in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.4-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64.

• own-backup-install.exe — setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.

Changed

• New VHDX and qcow2 disk chains reserve metadata space for all addressable source blocks, so filling a disk does not prematurely start another full backup. OBK increments reserve their own metadata space as needed.

Fixed

• A disk backup job follows partitions that Windows Update shrank, moved or recreated, such as the recovery partition. Before each run the job is matched against the disk as it is now and updated; the next copy is a full one, and the result says why. Such jobs used to fail with "file not found". A data partition that disappeared is never replaced by a guess.
• An incremental disk copy is never written over a parent copy with a different partition layout, which would have restored data into the wrong places.
• A copy that had to become a full one is named and recorded as a full copy, not with the name of the planned increment.
• Stopping an iSCSI target on Windows checks cancellation during socket waits, so an idle session no longer keeps the image open until its read timeout.
• Encrypted jobs can regain automatic access after their locally stored authorization is damaged, using the recovery key.
• Completed OBK images are published only after their data is durable; a restart removes unfinished images without exposing them as restore points.
• A backup that could not remove every excluded file reports the incomplete result instead of silently claiming full exclusion.
• Scheduled verification and the recovery of interrupted backup operations have been tightened.

Settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not.

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksum of the file is in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.3-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64.

• own-backup-install.exe — setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.

Added

• A menu beside each backup job, also available with a right click: rename, check the latest version or all versions, clean up selected versions, clone settings, mount a version as a disk, open the backup folder, save a version as a standalone VHDX, and delete the job.
• Version cleanup shows chains and their dependencies. Selecting a copy also selects the versions built on it; deletion requires confirmation and refuses to leave a version without its parent.
• Saving as VHDX follows the selected version's whole chain. The result opens with Windows alone, is independent of the job, and never replaces an existing file. Encrypted copies require a password or recovery key and are exported without encryption, with a warning before saving.

Changed

• The bottom strips of the menu, of the list and of the action bar are the same height, so their top lines meet in one line across the window. The buttons of the action bar sit as far from the bottom of the window as from that line; there used to be more room below them than above.

Fixed

• Checking an image from the command line no longer asks for administrator rights: verification reads image files directly.
• The installer no longer unpacks a copy of the service program into the temporary folder to stop the running service. An antivirus held that copy, service-control.exe, for analysis, and the installation stood still. The service is now stopped by the program that is already installed.

Settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not.

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksum of the file is in SHA256SUMS.txt.

0.1.2-beta

Prerelease for Windows 10/11 x64.

• own-backup-install.exe — setup wizard in English and Russian: installs the program for all users and starts its backup service; needs administrator rights. It installs over an earlier version, keeping settings and jobs.

The first published build. Earlier versions were handed over as separate executables and have no entries here.

Added

• Installer own-backup-install.exe, in Russian and English. It installs the program for all users into C:\Program Files\OwnBackup, registers and starts the backup service, and updates an earlier installation where it is. /S runs it without questions.
• The uninstaller keeps settings, jobs and history unless asked to delete them; backups are never touched. Deleting the settings also removes the remembered volume keys and what the window remembered: the theme and the language.
• The large mark in the side strip has a white rim and lets a tenth of the strip show through.
• Releases are built by GitHub from a version tag.

Changed

• own-backup-service.exe /install on a computer that already has the service points it at the copy it was run from, instead of failing with "the service already exists".
• LICENSE holds the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 as published; the required notice moved to NOTICE.

Fixed

• The theme switch at the bottom of the side strip no longer turns Same as Windows into a fixed theme when the press changes nothing on screen.

Settings and jobs are kept in C:\ProgramData\OwnBackup, the service log in the Logs folder next to the program. The window needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime: Windows 11 has it, and the installer says so if a Windows 10 does not.

License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; third-party components keep their own licenses. The checksum of the file is in SHA256SUMS.txt.