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The Obnam project is retired. See https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2017/08/13/retiring_obnam/ for more information. Please use another backup solution instead.
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Obnam is an easy, secure backup program. Backups can be stored on local hard disks, or online via the SSH SFTP protocol. The backup server, if used, does not require any special software, on top of SSH.
Some features that may interest you:
- Snapshot backups. Every generation looks like a complete snapshot, so you don’t need to care about full versus incremental backups, or rotate real or virtual tapes.
- Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations. If the backup repository already contains a particular chunk of data, it will be re-used, even if it was in another file in an older backup generation. This way, you don’t need to worry about moving around large files, or modifying them. (However, the current implementation has some limitations: see dedup).
- Encrypted backups, using GnuPG.
See the tutorial, and below for links to the manual, which has examples of how to use Obnam.
Obnam can do push or pull backups, depending on what you need. You can run Obnam on the client, and push backups to the server, or on the server, and pull from the client over SFTP. However, access to live data over SFTP is currently somewhat limited and fragile, so it is not recommended.
Documentation
- The full manual (currently a work in progress): available as:
- CI versions, built from git, but not yet released, are also available.
- The Obnam test suite is also meant to be useful for the more technical users of Obnam to read: web page, PDF.
- See also manuals built automatically from version control by Jan Niggemann: http://hz6.de/obnam-downloads/
- README
- NEWS
- obnam manual page: English, German.
- FAQ
- Development stuff
New repository format GREEN ALBATROSS
A new repository format, format-green-albatross, is being developed. Its goal is to make Obnam faster than than it currently is. See roadmap-ga for a rough roadmap finishing it.
Note that the main Obnam developer already uses GREEN ALBATROSS, but incompatible on-disk format changes are still possible. If you use GREEN ALBTROSS and a format change happens, you’ll need to start over with a new backup repository. Once the new repository format is stable, backwards incompatible changes won’t happen anymore. Also, given very few people use GREEN ALBATROSS so far, it has a higher risk of bugs than the default repository format. If you’re curious, please try GREEN ALBATROSS, but be aware of the risks.
Sponsored by Bytemark
Obnam development is partly sponsored by Bytemark by providing BigV virtual machines for development and benchmarking.
Sponsored by the FUUG foundation
The FUUG foundation gave a grant in September, 2015, for buying a fast machine with lots of disk space for development and benchmarking of Obnam.