Compared to others

Conserve aims to fill a good niche of being simpler and safer than Duplicity or Obnam, but more friendly to cloud storage than rsync.

The great thing about backup programs is, to some extent, you don't have to pick just one: for safety, make multiple backups with different tools and approaches. So this document is not to knock the other tools or to persuade you not to use them, but rather to explain why it's worth writing Conserve too.

Duplicity

Duplicity addresses a similar case of backup to cloud or dumb servers, and uses librsync delta compression. But it fails several Conserve manifesto items, some of them by design:

• Verification and restoring a single file requires reading the whole archive

• I have experienced Duplicity bugs that make the archive unreadable and, although it is based on simpler underlying formats (rdiff, rdiffdir, tar, etc) it is still hard in practice to recover

• Performance is unpredictable and sometimes bad.

Obnam

obnam format too complex? Otherwise looks pretty good.

rsync

• requires smart counterparty
• recent versions don't require sending a whole file list before sending files but it does always start scanning the whole filesystem from scratch, so a short run may not make progress
• stores files unpacked so can't encrypt and can only represent things the destination filesystem can represent (usernames, permissions, etc)
• no builtin incremental backup capabilities (though you can make hard-linked trees using some external script)