derekp7

snebu

C2013–2021

derekp7 / snebu

snebu

Simple Network Encrypting Backup Utility

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

3Distinct people

16Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

111GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Simple Network Encrypting Backup Utility

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

andrewchambers/bupstash · linked in 3 of the same discussions
borgbackup/borg · linked in 3 of the same discussions
dpc/rdedup · linked in 3 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:59:22 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year16 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-02-05 03:08:46 UTC to 2021-11-13 14:35:38 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2013	2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	0	4
2014	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	1	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	0	6

What Hacker News says

3 sources

derekp7·May 21, 2015

I wrote my own backup system, called Snebu (http://www.snebu.com hosted on github at http://www.github.com/derekp7/snebu). It works a lot like rsnapshot, but uses an sqlite3 DB for metadata storage and also does streaming compression (and encryption filter module is also coming soon). Client side resources are light -- just requires a system with gnu tar and gnu find, along with a bash shell for running the client-side script.

In Ask HN: What's your backup setup? Manual or Automated?

derekp7·Apr 24, 2015

Snebu ( http://www.snebu.com and https://github.com/derekp7/snebu ) is a Linux backup system that works kind of like rsync snapshot backups (i.e., similar to rsnapshot). Except it stores backup sets meta data in an sqlite database, and the files are stored as lzo compressed objects. Other than the standard features such as backup retention schedules, it has a number of small features that I haven't seen in a lot of similar backup utilities: * Path rewriting (grafting) -- this lets you mount an LVM snapshot somewhere, and the backed up copy can be stored referencing the original path (i.e., if you backup a snapshot of /srv/mydbfiles mounted on /mnt/snapshots/mydbfiles, you can tell it to store it on the backup server as if it was backed up from /srv/mydbfiles). This also works the other way for restoring files. * Safe expiring of old ba

Read the rest

ckups -- Let say you haven't backed up a particular host for a number of months (i.e., it has been decommissioned). When you tell the system to expire all backup older than 6 months, it will by default keep the 3 most recent backups [this number is tunable on the command line]. * Multiple user / granular permission support [ in the development branch, should make it in the next release ] -- You can give a given user ID the ability to backup but not restore, or backup and restore but not purge old backups, etc. That way if a host is compromised, you can ensure that an attacker can't delete backups from that compromised host. * If used in client/server mode, you can back up a client from the server without installing anything other than an SSH key (it just calls GNU find/tar on the client). Things missing that are currently being coded up: * Client side encryption * Multiple backend support (to support tape or cloud replication) * Local shadow copy -- lets you back up a laptop to a network server, but also do incremental snapshots to a local USB device when not on the network, and sync that to the network copy periodically.

In Ask HN: Brag about open-source projects you're proud of

derekp7·Apr 12, 2015

For me, the method I've found most comfortable are snapshot style whole disk backups. The common go-to solution is rsync/snapshots (ala rsnapshot or similar utilities), which I've used in the past. However this only does partial deduplication (it deduplicates files that are in the same path from one backckup to the next), and it doesn't compress. So to remedy that I wrote Snebu (http://www.snebu.com), which stores lzo-compressed files on the target using sha1 hash for the file name (somewhat like Git does), and has an sqlite DB to store the metadata (file paths, ownership, backup set name/date, etc). Therefore you get full file-level dedup even across multiple clients writing to the same backend. On the client side, it uses standard GNU find and tar, so you can use it on Windows with the help of Cygwin. Each backup set has a retenti

Read the rest

on schedule label (daily, weekly, etc) to make it easy to selectively purge old backups (i.e., keep the current 10 daily, 6 weekly, and 12 monthly backups). I've got the client side script tweaked so that you can run it as a standalone setup (backup to a local USB drive), or backup to a remote Linux server via a non-privileged account, or have the remote backup server pull backups from your clients. The features that are currently in development for the next version include client-side encryption, and pluggable backend replication, so you can replicate your backup sets to cloud providers, or tape, or to another Snebu installation. I can definitely use some more feedback, probably need to do another round of documentation improvements, but overall the code seems quite stable. The project sites is up on github (github.com/derekp7/snebu) if you are interested in contributing.

In Ask HN: What are your personal backup / sync strategies?