Conserve: a robust backup program

Conserve copies files, directories, and (on Unix) symlinks from a local source tree, to an archive directory, and retrieves them on demand.

Conserve's guiding principles:

• Safe: Conserve is written in Rust, a fast systems programming language with compile-time guarantees about types, memory safety, and concurrency.
• Robust: If one file is corrupted in storage or due to a bug in Conserve, you can still restore others.
• Careful: Data files already written are never touched or altered, unless you choose to purge them.
• When you need help now: Restoring a subset of a large backup is fast.
• Always ready: You can restore recently-written files before the backup job completes.
• Always making progress: Even if the backup process or its network connection is repeatedly killed, Conserve can quickly pick up where it left off and make forward progress.
• Ready for today: The storage format is fast and reliable on on high-latency, limited-capability, unlimited-capacity, eventually-consistent cloud object storage.

Quick start guide

conserve init /backup/home.conserve
conserve backup /backup/home.conserve ~
conserve restore /backup/home.conserve /tmp/trial-restore

Inspecting history

Conserve archives retain all previous versions of backups, stored in bands. Bands are identified a string of integers starting with b, like b0000:

$ conserve versions /backup/home.conserve
b0000       2012-12-02T16:24:33   conservetesthost.local
b0001       2012-12-02T16:24:45   conservetesthost.local

ls shows all the files in a band, including the time they were made and the host from which they were made. Like all commands that read a band from an archive, it operates on the most recent by default.

Install

Conserve runs on Linux, OS X, Windows, and probably other systems that support Rust.

To build Conserve you need Rust and a C compiler that can be used by Rust. Then run

cargo build

More documentation

• A comparison to other backup systems

• Software and format versioning

• Archive format

Limitations

Conserve is still in a pre-1.0 alpha. It can be used to make and restore backups, but there are some important performance and functional limitations, which will be fixed before 1.0.

• There are no incremental backups: all backups store all files.
• There is no way to exclude files/subdirectories from backup or restore.
• The planned validate command is not implemented, however a trial restore from the archive will test everything can be read.
• The planned feature of resuming an interrupted backup is not implemented: Conserve will just create a new full backup from the beginning.
• conserve diff is also not implemented, but can be simulated by restoring to a temporary directory and comparing that to the source.
• The conserve purge command to trim the backup archive is not implemented, but the b0123 band directories can be deleted directly.
• Permissions and ownership are not stored.

Prior to 1.0, data formats may change on each minor version number change (0.x): you should restore using the same version that you used to make the backup.

For a longer list see the issue tracker and milestones.

Licence and non-warranty

Copyright 2012-2016 Martin Pool, mbp@sourcefrog.net.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Contact

Conserve's homepage is: http://conserve.fyi/ and you can talk to me in Gitter.