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Ask HN: Any backup software similar to version control?

9 points by mushly ↗ HN
Are there any incremental backup solutions that can both

1. Allow you to view the state an entire directory was in at a particular time (ala GitHub when you click on a particular commit)

2. Allow you to view the changelog of a particular file

11 comments

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modzilla
Apple's Time Machine keeps daily (or more frequent within a given day) snap shots of all of your folders.[1]

Also, in any native OSX app each "save" works like a git commit, you can browse all "versions." [2]

Combined, these native OSX features do exactly what you want.

[1] http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

[2] http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202255

mushly
Very cool, looks like I may get a Mac soon then :)
excpt
1.) VEEAM for VMware or Hyper-V does this job. You can access restore points at a specific point of time. 2.) Never saw a file-diff tool implemented in a backup software. You may only have backup logs for your incremental backups about the size, duration, etc. If that's what you meant by view changelogs of a backup file.
mushly
Heh, I don't need file-diff specifically. I just want to see for example this file was last changed on Tuesday, and be able to pull up the Tuesday version.
excpt
This is exactly what you can do with VEEAM. You can even set your backup strategy to continious integration. As soon as one backup up for the virtual machine is done another incremental will be created; with minimal impact on I/O performance. To save backup-disk-space you may want to enable deduplication in VEEAM.

When you browse you backups you can choose from the available backups and you can open and browse the complete file system at this specific date and time. You can restore one or more specific files or directories directly back to the origin destination or copy & paste them to a different location on any target. You also can start the entire VM directly from backup at this state in an isolated environment to access the system as a working machine. There are tons and tons of more features inside this backup solution.

We run this solution in our office and for most of our customers with virtualized environments. There is even a free version of veeam that lacks datacenter features but you can backup your VMs.

Our usual backup intervals between 8a.m. and 9p.m. is 2 hours. We ensure to have about 5 to 8 restore points during work ours.

So you will have to choose the Tuesdays version of the file at a specific time.

You may want to give it a try if you're running ESXi or Hyper-V.

striking
Just use Git (sans GitHub) for whatever you're doing. It works quite well on just about any content (although viewing changes/merges is a little more difficult without setting up special mergetools and difftools for special files like images)
mushly
Hm, I thought Git doesn't handle versioning of binary blobs so well though?