Box Backup

An open source, completely automatic on-line backup system for UNIX.

• All backed up data is stored on the server in files on a filesystem -- no tape or archive devices are used
• The server is trusted only to make files available when they are required -- all data is encrypted
• A backup daemon runs on systems to be backed up, and copies encrypted data to the server when it notices changes
• Only changes within files are sent to the server, just like rsync
• Old versions of files on the server are stored as changes from the current version
• Behaves like tape -- old versions and deleted files are available
• Choice of backup behaviour, optimised for document or server backup
• Designed to be easy and cheap to run a server. Portable implementation, and RAID implemented in userland for reliability without complex server setup or expensive hardware. (optional)

Implementation

There are three main elements

• bbstored -- backup store server.
• bbackupd -- backup client daemon, which scans for changes and uploads them to the server.
• bbackupquery -- backup query and restore tool.

Running the store server is a multi-step process, but the backup client is easy.

TLS (SSL revised) is used to encrypt connections, and more importantly, to authenticate servers and clients with both server and client side certificates. Scripts are provided to generate and manage these certificates.

Stored files are encrypted using AES for file data and Blowfish for metadata. This does mean that the one thing you do need to back up off-site and look after is a 1k file containing your keys -- the data on the server is useless without it. But it never changes, so that's OK.

Download

See the wiki for the latest compilation and installation instructions.

Source code is available on GitHub.

Documentation

The wiki contains user contributed documentation. Please use it for up to date information about Box Backup.

Since GitHub refuses to let search engines index wikis, where our documentation lives, we link to GHWSEE which kindly provides a free proxy of GitHub wikis that is indexable, so that search engines will follow this link and index our docs, so that you can find them by searching.

Mailing list

Please join the project mailing list, boxbackup@boxbackup.org, for announcements of new versions and discussion of the system. Join at the sign up page.