Obnam – this project is retired **AWOL**

Last Updated on October 26, 2020

Obnam (OBligatory NAMe) was an easy to use, secure Python based backup program.

Obnam makes, restores, manipulates, and otherwise deals with backups. It can store backups on a local disk or to a server via sftp. Every backup generation looks like a fresh snapshot, but is really incremental: the user does not need to worry whether it’s a full backup or not. Only changed data is backed up, and if a chunk of data is already backed up in another file, that data is re-used.

Backups can be stored on local hard disks, or online via the SSH SFTP protocol. The backup server, if used, does not require any special software, on top of SSH.

Obnam performs de-duplication by splitting up file data into chunks, and storing those individually. Generations are incremental backups; Every backup generation looks like a fresh snapshot, but is really incremental.

Features include:

• Easy to use.
• Snapshot backups.
• Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations.
• Encrypted backups, using GnuPG.
• Backup multiple clients to a single repository.
• Backup checkpoints (creates a “save” every 100MBs or so).
• Number of options for performance tuning including lru-size and/or upload-queue-size.
• MD5 checksum algorithm for recognising duplicate data chunks.
• Store backups to a server via SFTP.
• Supports both push (i.e. Run on the client) and pull (i.e. Run on the server) methods.

Website: obnam.org
Support:
Developer: Bruno Cornec, Andree Leidenfrost, Lars Rupp, Mike Roark
License: GNU GPL v3

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