Kopia
Encrypted, deduplicated backups to disks, servers or cloud storage
Alternative toBackblaze Personal Backup
Kopia takes snapshots of your folders, deduplicates and compresses them, encrypts them on your machine, and stores them on a local disk, an SFTP server or cloud storage. It is Apache-2.0 licensed, written in Go, with both a command line tool and a desktop app.
Best for when
- you need encrypted backups of a server or desktop
- you want one copy off site in cheap object storage
- you want a choice between a command line and a desktop app
Watch out for
- losing the repository password means losing access to every backup
- retention policies and maintenance need understanding, defaults may not match your needs
- it backs up files, so databases should be dumped first for consistent copies
Snapshots that only store what changed
Each Kopia snapshot looks like a full copy of your folders, but only new or changed data is uploaded, thanks to content deduplication. Everything is encrypted before it leaves the machine, so the storage provider sees only opaque blobs. Policies control how many hourly, daily and monthly snapshots to keep.
It works with local disks, network shares, SFTP, S3 compatible storage, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage and more. It suits anyone who needs real backups of a server or a desktop, including the classic rule of keeping one copy off site.
What running it costs
Kopia itself is light. The real costs are the storage you back up to and the time to set schedules and retention. A repository server mode lets several machines back up to one place, with its own web interface.
Two things matter more than the tool: keep the repository password somewhere safe, because without it the backup cannot be decrypted, and test restores regularly. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
