Third-Party Incremental Backup Software for MacOS

[Bigwaff]

You could have configured Time Machine to ignore the folder containing the SQLite database.

 

[wegster]

Great list and discussion.
Way back I fought with trying to get TM working sanely to a NAS and it drove me nuts enough that I ignored years of building and managing some fairly big datacenters with strict backup and DR processes in place (and tested etc). Problems then seemed to be in TM itself and Apple never considering ‘real’ backup solutions, e.g. to network storage not in the same location, etc.) and wasnt even worth trying for VM backups as it was just wholly unreliable.

I eventually gave up on finding a more comprehensive solution, went through Super Duper and the landed on CCC as already mentioned. That’s changed a bit over time to push CCC backups to cloud, and I think the option exists to retain ‘last N’ change, but it’s not block level. I mat give some of the above a look, although in general CCC has worked well for a long hike now.

 

[rumourmonger]

borg backup: vorta is a great gui

restic (mentioned before in this thread) is usable now has a great web based gui - backrest

tarsnap: costly; has a somewhat okay gui - tarsnap-gui; one can consider for smaller datasets because of higher cost; doesn't have features like borg, restic though

kopia: comes with an official barebone gui; i don't really get this app but many seem to love it

All are FOSS; except tarsnap (I think) and tarsnap comes with a pre-baked backup destination (s3); in others, you take your pick of data storage local or remote.

 

[ChrisA]

Hi,

Can anyone suggest a good third-party backup program for MacOS which supports fast incremental backup?

Why don't you tell us why you can't use Time Machine? Without knowing this, we are very likely to recommend a backup system that is whatever problem TM has.

I'd recommend going with Open Source. No one will ever be able to change the terms of use, and the company can't go bankrupt.

Look at Borg Backup. It does data deduplication, compression, and encryption. It can easily be automated to run every day.

The advantage of TM is that it uses some features of APFS to make the backup process very efficient. Like, for example, snapshotting the entire file system and backing up only what changed.

 

[gilby101]

Why don't you tell us why you can't use Time Machine? Without knowing this, we are very likely to recommend a backup system that is whatever problem TM has.

The first post said "Can anyone suggest a good third-party backup program for MacOS which supports fast incremental backup? I'm looking for a program which can operate in a matter so that I don't have to re-backup the entirety of a large database or large binary file when only a single part of it changes, rather, only the part that changed should be backed up."

TM backs up the whole of large files with even the most minor change. This is why TM can't be used for these files. As well as large databases, virtual machines are the most common example - these are usually excluded from TM.

So the OP explicitly wants a backup product which is efficient doing small changes to large files.