Kopia Backup, a valid alternative to Borg and Restic

In the landscape of backup tools, choosing the optimal solution can be complex given the variety of options available. Among these, Borg and Restic have gained notoriety for their effectiveness and reliability. However, a new actor like copy is emerging as a solid alternative, thanks to its rich feature set and flexibility. In this article, we will explore why in detail Kopia represents a valid alternative to Borg and Restic, analyzing its characteristics, snapshot management methods, and backup policies.

Main features of Kopia

Kopia stands out in the backup field with a host of advanced features that amplify its appeal for both business and personal users. Its main features include:

Multiple Support for Storage Providers

Kopia's broad support for various storage providers is manifested through its compatibility with a wide range of storage solutions, both in the cloud and on-premise. This flexibility allows users to choose the storage solution best suited to their specific needs, making the most of the features of each service.

• Amazon S3 and S3 compatibles: Kopia supports Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), an object storage service that offers scalability, data security, high availability and performance. Additionally, it is compatible with other storage services that adhere to the S3 standard, allowing for broad flexibility and integration with storage solutions based on this technology.
• Azure Blob Storage: This storage service from Microsoft provides a scalable solution for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text and binary data. Kopia can leverage Azure Blob Storage to benefit from its advanced security and data management features.
• Backblaze B2: A high-performance and cost-effective cloud storage solution, Backblaze B2 is powered by Kopia, giving users a reliable option for data backup and storage with ease of access and recovery.
• Google Cloud Storage: Google Cloud Storage is a powerful and scalable object storage service that Kopia can use to store data securely in Google's cloud, leveraging its analytics and machine learning capabilities.
• Remote servers or cloud storage that support WebDAV and SFTP: Kopia allows storage on remote servers or cloud storage through the WebDAV and SFTP protocols, offering versatility for accessing and managing files across different platforms and services.
• Cloud storage options supported by Rclone: Thanks to its compatibility with Rclone, Kopia extends its support to a wide range of cloud storage solutions, allowing users to leverage Rclone-supported storage services for their backup and archiving needs.
• Local machines, network storage or servers: Kopia supports storage on local devices and servers, including network storage, providing a convenient solution for backing up and archiving data within existing infrastructure.
• Own servers by configuring a Kopia Repository Server: Users can set up a Kopia Repository Server on their servers, creating a customized infrastructure for data backup and storage that leverages the security and efficiency of Kopia.

This versatility makes Kopia an ideal solution for a wide range of storage and backup scenarios, allowing users to leverage the power and flexibility of cloud computing alongside the security and convenience of local storage.

Deduplication and Compression

Kopia employs advanced deduplication methodologies, comparing blocks of data to identify duplicate copies across multiple backups. This process eliminates the need to store the same data multiple times, significantly reducing the space required. In addition, data compression further reduces the size of stored data by compressing files into formats that take up less space. These techniques not only optimize the use of storage space but also help reduce storage-related operational costs while maintaining the integrity and accessibility of data over time.

Granular Conservation Policies

Kopia offers users the ability to define highly customizable data retention policies. This includes the ability to precisely specify how long to keep backups and how many versions of files to keep. This flexibility allows users to balance between the need for access to historical data and storage space limitations, ensuring that resources are used efficiently and that critical data is available when needed.

File Browsing and Restore

Through an intuitive interface, Kopia allows users to explore the contents of backups and select specific files or directories for recovery. This targeted approach to data recovery reduces downtime and improves operational efficiency by allowing you to quickly recover only the resources you need without the need to recover entire data sets.

Cryptography

Kopia's end-to-end encryption ensures that all data, whether in transit to your storage system or at rest, is protected through the use of advanced cryptographic algorithms. This additional layer of security ensures that sensitive data is made inaccessible to unauthorized users, strengthening the protection of business and personal data.

Incremental Backups

By implementing incremental backups, Kopia identifies and copies only data that has changed since the last backup, allowing significant savings in terms of time and storage space. This efficient approach makes it easy to manage frequent backups, ensuring that the latest versions of your data are always safeguarded with minimal impact on system performance.

Modern Technology Stack

Kopia is based on a set of contemporary technologies, such as Content-Defined Chunking (CDC) for deduplication, Merkle Trees for data integrity verification, and gRPC for efficient network communications. These technology choices position Kopia as a cutting-edge backup management solution, offering high performance, robust security and scalability.

Extensibility

Kopia's modular design and its RESTful API facilitate integration with other applications and services, allowing users to extend the core functionality to meet specific needs. Whether automating backup workflows, integrating with monitoring systems, or implementing custom data management solutions, Kopia provides a flexible and powerful platform.

Snapshot with Kopia: Advanced Data Protection

Snapshots in Kopia capture the current state of files and directories, including metadata, enabling precise and targeted data recovery. This technique not only facilitates storage space management through incremental backups but also allows users to quickly restore specific versions of data, improving the resilience and availability of information.

Setting Up and Using Kopia

Kopia's ease of use, thanks to its graphical interface (GUI) and command line interface (CLI), makes the solution accessible to users of all levels of technical expertise. The initial setup wizard and detailed customization of backup settings allow users to tailor the software to their specific needs, simplifying data management and protecting critical information.

Backup Policies and Snapshot Management

Kopia allows detailed configuration of backup policies, including selecting files and directories for snapshots, defining backup frequency, excluding specific items, and determining snapshot retention periods. This customization ensures that backup strategies are aligned with company policies and operational needs, ensuring efficient data protection that complies with required standards.

Interface and Server Mode

Kopia adapts to user preferences by offering both a command line-based interface and a GUI. For more technical users, the CLI offers access to all of Kopia's advanced features, while the GUI simplifies interaction for those who prefer a more visual approach. Additionally, Kopia can run in server mode, offering an accessible web interface for managing backups.

Performance and Benchmark of Kopia compared to Restic and Borg

When comparing backup solutions, Kopia emerges as a particularly high-performance and efficient option, especially when compared with Restic and Borg. Both Restic and Borg offer initial and incremental backup capabilities, using deduplication to optimize disk space. Borg features a more efficient deduplication implementation than Restic, thanks to the use of a content-defined chunking algorithm that minimizes data redundancy.

Kopia, adopting a similar strategy to Borg with a content-aware chunking algorithm, is positioned as the most efficient solution in terms of managing changes in data. With its ability to perform snapshot-based backups, Kopia not only ensures data consistency but also facilitates precise restoration to any point in time of backed up data. Kopia's intuitive user interface and ability to mount snapshots as a read-only file system further elevate its usability and effectiveness.

From a resource consumption perspective, Kopia stands out for its greater efficiency, requiring less RAM and processing power during backup processes than Restic and Borg. This makes it an ideal solution for resource-limited environments. In terms of deduplication and compression, Kopia uses less complex algorithms than Borg, resulting in lower resource consumption without compromising effectiveness.

Benchmark tests confirm Kopia's superior capabilities. According to analyzes conducted by Hostinger and Kasten, Kopia surpassed Restic and Borg in terms of speed in backing up large volumes of data. In particular, Kopia has shown significant improvements in newer versions, reducing backup times from around 840 seconds to just 200 seconds for 200GiB of data, a significantly better result than its competitors.

Conclusions

Kopia emerges as a powerful and flexible backup solution, capable of meeting a wide range of needs thanks to its support for multiple storage providers, advanced retention policies, navigation and recovery features, and robust security measures. Its modern architecture and extensibility make it an excellent choice for those looking for an alternative to Borg and Restic. Whether it is a corporate or personal environment, Kopia offers the tools to implement an effective and reliable backup strategy, ensuring data protection and availability over time.