backup-maker

Install it on the one computer you want protected. Everything else is just somewhere to put the copies — no software to install over there, no accounts, nothing leaving your network.

Every folder you choose is mirrored, in real time, onto as many places as you like at once:

• a drive inside or plugged into that computer — an SD card, a USB stick, an external disk
• a USB drive plugged into your router
• a NAS
• a shared folder on any Windows, Mac or Linux machine on your network — if it can share a folder, it can hold your backups, with nothing installed on it

That's the whole model: one install, many destinations.

Optionally, a second computer can also run backup-maker and pair with the first. That unlocks the strongest transfer mode (block-level, verified, delta sync) and works between any operating systems — but it is an upgrade, not the point. You never need it.

Fully self-hosted, and local by design

Your backups go to hardware you own, over your own network. There is no cloud service, no account, no telemetry, and no off-site mode — not disabled by default, but absent. The sync engine is locked to your local network: public discovery, relays and NAT traversal are all switched off with no setting to turn them back on, so your machine is never announced to anyone. The dashboard listens on 127.0.0.1 only. Network scanning runs solely when you click the button.

The one time anything is downloaded is if you pair a second machine: a pinned, checksum-verified Syncthing build, fetched once. Backing up to drives, routers, NAS boxes and shared folders never touches the internet at all.

Update checking is off by default. backup-maker can ask github.com once a day whether a newer release exists and tell you when there is one. It is the only part of the program that would contact an outside service on its own, so it stays off until you switch it on — and it only ever tells you: nothing is downloaded, replaced or run, and you choose when to upgrade. The request carries a User-Agent and nothing else; no machine name, no version, no identifier.

Two other things can leave your network, and only if you switch them on. Alerts can be delivered to a webhook address of your choosing, or pushed to your phone through ntfy — including the public ntfy.sh server if that is the one you pick. Both are off by default and never required: backups work identically without them, and nothing is sent anywhere until you enter an address. Your backed-up data is never involved either way — only a short message saying something needs attention. If you would rather the receiving server learn nothing at all, "Don't include any detail" reduces that message to a severity and a fixed sentence, with no machine, folder or destination names. See 5. Monitoring your backups.

For a copy that survives your house, use a drive you rotate somewhere else — see Hardware guidance.

Project snapshot (for anyone — human or AI — getting oriented): a working Go application; one self-contained binary per OS (Linux, Windows, macOS) carrying the CLI and the localhost web dashboard. Core sync paths for all three destination types are implemented and end-to-end tested. See "Status & roadmap" below for what's not built yet, and the documentation for everything else. Author: Phil Kokoska.

• Real-time & incremental — a saved file is on every destination within seconds; only changed files transfer, never the whole tree.
• One-way with history — destinations are mirrors of the source and keep ~30 days of old file versions, so deleting or corrupting a file on your computer can't silently destroy the backup.
• Any OS, zero runtime dependencies — one self-contained binary each for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Network drives are reached with a built-in SMB client: no mounting, no admin rights.
• Private by default — no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry. Machine-to- machine pairing (if you use it) is mutually-authenticated TLS. Network scanning runs only when you ask — never in the background.

What it looks like

Install, start the daemon, and open the dashboard — it walks you through your first backup. Everything below runs on 127.0.0.1; nothing is published anywhere.

The folders, drives and computers in these screenshots are examples, not real machines.

Setting up a backup

The wizard is how backups are made — every one of them, not just the first. Each run sets up a single backup, and each step asks one question.

1. What kind of backup is this? The two kinds protect against different things, so this is asked first: it changes what the rest of the wizard needs to know.

• Incremental — a live copy. Save a file and it's on the destination within seconds. What lands there is an ordinary, browsable copy of your files, plus roughly 30 days of previous versions. This is the one that saves you from a deleted file, a bad edit, or a dead drive.
• Timed — sealed snapshots. On your schedule, everything is packed into one AES-256 encrypted zip, and nothing is copied in between. This is the one that lets you go back to exactly how things were on a given day, or hand someone a sealed copy to keep off-site.

You can have both: run the wizard twice.

2. Which folder should be protected? Click through your folders, or type a path. Whatever folder you're looking at can be protected from the path bar, so you can navigate into the thing you want and choose it there.

3. Where should the copies go? You get a list of computers — this one, and any on your network sharing storage. Click one to see what it offers, and tick as many destinations as you like, across as many machines as you like.

A locked computer asks for credentials right there — nothing to install on it. And a second internal disk, or any folder at all, works just as well: "Or choose any folder on this computer".

4. Check it over and start. Nothing is written until you confirm, and if any destination can't be reached, nothing is saved — you never end up half protected while believing otherwise.

Timed backups get one extra step — how often, the password, and whether to include everything. Snapshots normally skip the same junk as the mirror; ticking that option seals node_modules and build output into the archive while the live mirror stays lean. There is no recovery path if the password is lost, and the wizard says so rather than burying it.

Adding a second backup to the same folder

A folder can have more than one kind of backup. Run the wizard again and the folder step offers what you're already protecting:

So a folder mirrored continuously to an SD card can also get a daily snapshot on a different drive, without being set up twice.

Watching it work

The dashboard shows every folder against every destination, and keeps the two kinds of backup apart: Incremental backups and Timed snapshots are separate panels, so you can see at a glance which promise a folder actually has. Folders you've stopped move to No longer protected, where the copies they left behind are still named.

While files are moving you get live progress per destination — real byte counts, updating in place. Nothing needs refreshing.

Each destination also shows how full it is — a usage bar and "312GB free of 1.8TB", turning amber as it tightens and red once it crosses the headroom you've reserved (see When a destination fills up). A destination that's asleep or unreachable keeps its last reading, marked "as of 2h ago", rather than the bar vanishing. Free space is read once a minute, so watching the dashboard never hammers a network drive.

When something is wrong it says so plainly: a destination that's offline, one unreachable long enough to go stale, waiting to pair (connected but not yet approved), or another machine asking for approval.

There's more — a read-only view for your phone, a status page that works while this computer is off, and the small-screen layout — in Monitoring your backups.

Install

Download the archive for your OS and CPU from the latest release, unpack it, and put the backup-maker binary somewhere on your PATH. It's a single self-contained file — no runtime to install, no service to register, and still nothing to install on the destinations.

tar xzf backup-maker_0.1.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo install backup-maker /usr/local/bin/
backup-maker version

On Windows, unzip the archive and run backup-maker.exe from wherever you keep it. On macOS the binaries aren't code-signed, so the first run is blocked until you either allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security, or clear the quarantine flag yourself:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./backup-maker

Every release ships a checksums.txt. To check a download arrived intact:

sha256sum -c checksums.txt --ignore-missing

Prefer to compile it? See Building from source.

Quick start

backup-maker init
backup-maker add-folder ~/code        # what to protect
backup-maker daemon &                 # start the engine
backup-maker autostart enable         # survive reboots
backup-maker web                      # or set it all up in the browser

That gets a folder protected. Getting started covers the rest: adding drives, network shares and paired machines, making the daemon survive a logout as well as a reboot, and what does and doesn't get copied.

Documentation

The full set lives in docs/, in roughly the order you'll need it. It is also built into the binary: click Docs in the dashboard, or run backup-maker docs --export ./manual to write it out as web pages you can read with no daemon, no web server and no internet.

Getting started

• Getting started — your first backup, keeping the daemon running, adding destinations, and what gets copied.

Destinations

• Choosing destinations — the arrangement that covers the most failure modes for the least money, and how to size it.
• Preparing a new drive — a drive out of the box has no filesystem and cannot hold backups until it has one. Formatting and mounting it, including readying one for a Pi on a different computer.
• Hardware guidance — categories and principles rather than brands: always-on targets, offsite options, drives, formats.
• Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a backup target — from an empty microSD card to a Pi that receives backups around the clock.

Using it

• Timed snapshots — encrypted point-in-time copies on a timer, alongside the live mirror, and how to pause or change a schedule.
• Monitoring your backups — desktop alerts when backups stop working, the read-only network view, the status page written onto each destination, and the phone layout.
• When a destination fills up — what gets deleted to make room, what never does, and how to turn it on.
• Sleeping computers — why a sleeping destination silently stops receiving backups, and the three fixes including Wake-on-LAN.

When things go wrong

• Restoring & recovery — getting a file back, rebuilding a machine from a destination, and repairing a backup someone edited.
• Security & safety properties — the guarantees, where credentials live, and why there is no off-site mode.

Reference

• Reference — config file locations, the daemon's architecture, building from source, and cutting a release.

Status & roadmap

Implemented and E2E-tested: all three target types (local drive, SMB network drive, paired machine), real-time sync, versioning, offline/catch-up, wrong-drive refusal, read-back verification, on-demand network scan, scheduled encrypted archive snapshots (CLI wizard and browser), automatic space reclamation on full destinations, adopting an existing destination on a new machine from its on-disk manifest (browser wizard and CLI), Wake-on-LAN for sleeping targets, the browser setup wizard with folder picker and machine/storage browsing, live per-destination transfer progress, folder and destination management from the dashboard, a Settings panel (which alerts you get and how they reach you), desktop notifications, webhook and ntfy delivery, a read-only network view for other devices — open to the whole network or to devices you approve one at a time — a status page written to each destination, autostart, unit/conformance tests (go test ./...; SMB suite runs against a real server via BM_SMB_TEST_URL), plus an end-to-end browser test that drives the real dashboard against a real daemon.

Not yet built: Windows firewall helper command, OS-keychain credential storage.

Support

backup-maker is free and open source, built and maintained by one person. If it saved you a hard drive, you can buy me a coffee. ☕

License

MIT License — see LICENSE. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md; the Syncthing engine (MPL-2.0) is downloaded as a separate, unmodified official binary at first run.