Introduction

blk-archive is a tool for archiving block devices.

Archived data is deduplicated, compressed and stored in a directory within a file system.

blk-archive is not a complete backup solution. But it may well make an excellent first step in a backup process. For instance you may wish to sync the archive directory to cloud storage, or write it to tape.

It works particularly well with the thin provisioning device-mapper target:

• Thin snapshots can be used to archive live data.
• it avoids reading unprovisioned areas of thin devices.
• it can calculate deltas between thin devices to minimise how much data is read and deduped.
• restoring to a thin device tries to maximise data sharing within the thin pool (a big win if you're restoring snapshots).

Status

This project is in a alpha state.

See doc/TODO.md for more info.

Documentation

At the moment the best introduction to the tool is the Use Cases document in the doc directory.

The files in the doc/ directory are in markdown format so can be read in any text viewer. However, they were edited using the Obsidian tool (https://obsidian.md), and you will get a prettier viewing experience if you also use this tool.

Building

blk-archive is written in Rust. You will need to install a recent tool chain. I recommend using rustup.

Build via the standard cargo tool.

cargo build --release

Do not forget the --release flag, debug builds can be an order of magnitude slower. The executable will be in target/release/.