text stringlengths 0 1.49k |
|---|
**Alexander Neumann:** Was it Sub7 maybe? |
**Erik St. Martin:** The Trojan? |
**Alexander Neumann:** Yeah, the Trojan. |
**Erik St. Martin:** This one was called DeepThroat, I think. I forget what Back Orifice was written in... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, my God... |
**Alexander Neumann:** I think it was C \[unintelligible 00:06:23.18\] \[laughter\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** It was a family-friendly show... |
**Ashley McNamara:** Nerd so hard right now... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, my God... \[laughter\] Ashley and I are just gonna take a break and blow our noses while you guys have your little nerdgasms with all of these sexually-connotate penetration-testing names... \[laughter\] Back Orifice... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That term didn't even exist in the '90s though. |
**Alexander Neumann:** Yeah, so Go was just a tool for getting the job done. I would like to have a backup program, and basically I started this to scratch my own itch. Go came along, and I would like to do something in Go, so it was Go. To be honest, I really liked the community and so on, but the most important part ... |
I started developing some things and trying out this cool deduplicating algorithm that I found in an old math paper, and then I basically started and wrote a detailed design document for the server-side storage data that is to be backed up. |
Usually, my programs (at least before Restic) tended to be like I'm hacking on things, and the specification is the code... But this is not a good idea when you plan to restore from a repository that has been created like 10 years before; for maybe that the code doesn't compile anymore we have like Go 3, which is not b... |
Somebody even started a Python implementation for the repository format, and so on. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, that's neat. |
**Ashley McNamara:** Yeah, that is pretty cool. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, I have to say, looking at the repo, one of the things that we do before the show - we kind of go in and look at the source code... And you have committed your vendor directory, and I say kudos to you, my friend! Kudos to you for committing that vendor repository. That is awesome. |
I think as a person who ships binary, you should commit that vendor directory if you want to have reproducible builds, and your whole point is to have nice, simple, easy builds for the people who are using Restic, so good job! |
**Alexander Neumann:** Thank you! This is actually one of the things that took some time to create, a binary that can be described completely by the GitHub commit ID that is currently checked out in the branch. |
The other thing in Restic that's a bit different from other projects - maybe other projects like Camlistore and Docker already also have that - we have a build script called `build.go`. At the moment you can't install Restic by using `go get`, and some part of that is intentional, because when I'm using `go get`, then ... |
This proves really valuable over time, because sometimes people tend to build strange setups and strange things, and I was always able to pin down the exact software version that somebody was running, and this was really helpful. |
**Ashley McNamara:** So you did this project just to learn Go, or was there a specific use case for yourself that you were trying to solve for? |
**Alexander Neumann:** Primarily, I would like to solve my personal use case, which is like a 20-25 gigabyte directory in my Home directory called "Shared", and I would like to create a backup of it at least once a day, even better when it's more than once a day. And I would like to keep a lot of revisions of this shar... |
The problem with that is that I have access to many different servers, but usually these are not for my exclusive use, and these are even located somewhere like in a data center, or there's a co-administrator who also has root access. This needs to be taken into account, Restic has a defined thread model. One of the th... |
The only thing that such people can do is remove files or destroy the repository, but they shouldn't be able to decrypt my files or get any information about the data that I back up. And especially, I would like to notice when somebody changes things or tinkers around with the files saved in there. This is also a nice ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That sounds really similar to the way `git` files are stored, with the _pack files_. |
**Ashley McNamara:** Right. |
**Alexander Neumann:** Yeah, the design of Restic is heavily inspired by `git` and `pop` and so on. I think there are so many good ideas in these designs... So I just had a look at it and took the part that can be applied to backup, my storage location, and that worked really beautifully. |
**Ashley McNamara:** Were you expecting it to become so popular so quick? Now how are you dealing with contributors and releases? Was it an accidental burden at some point? |
**Alexander Neumann:** What do you mean by burden? |
**Ashley McNamara:** You know, like when you accidentally create something that's really great and then everyone wants more and more and more of your time and you didn't realize that you didn't have any time...? \[laughter\] |
**Alexander Neumann:** Oh yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I was not expecting for it to be so popular, but it seems that I was not alone in the result of my research for a good backup program. I'm trying to dampen the enthusiasm of the contributors a bit, because this is a weekend recreational project for me and I ... |
In terms of support requests, there haven't been so many, but there have been several companies that would like to use it. It's BSD-licensed, so they can just use it, but they cannot expect from me to give them support apart from what support I can give in my spare time. |
Sometimes you need to be very direct and honest to people creating issues. Something like "Oh, we're building a [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/) integration for Restic. How much support can you give us?" I try to be direct and honest, so that they know... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Like, zero... |
**Alexander Neumann:** Yeah, so that they know what they can expect. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's where you say "That Fork button is right up on the top, there on the right. Just hit that little Fork button right there. There you go." |
**Ashley McNamara:** \[laughs\] Yeah, that's what I did. |
**Alexander Neumann:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** "It's all you, baby." |
**Alexander Neumann:** It's very awesome that people sit down and fork the project and create their own add-ons and their own backends. There have been several proposed backends for example in the past. For example, we support at the moment a local backend where all the backups are just stored in the local file system.... |
People have already suggested that it may be a good idea to support Backblaze, which is a backup storage company by itself, but they also have an API for blob storage. Somebody created such backend code for Restic, but unfortunately it was not good enough in terms of the project wasn't ready to accept this backend, so ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** No, it's very difficult. I like the [Minio](https://github.com/minio/minio) integration. I run Minio on my NAS at home, and I point Restic to the Minio instance that's running on my NAS and it's just so darn fast. And I love the fact that Minio is written in Go, and I just have this tiny little bina... |
**Alexander Neumann:** You should check out the latest release of Restic, which I've done a few hours ago. It's a pre-release for 0.6.0, and the S3 backend support is much more awesome now. I'm using a lower-level API for the S3 library by Minio, and I was able to reduce the allocations by a factor of around 98% less a... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Holy cow. |
**Alexander Neumann:** So try it again... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Wow! It was fast before... I love it. Alright, downloading. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I know you have another project that basically spun out of Restic, which is what you do, kind of like your deduping. Have you done the deduping from the beginning? How much less space did your backup start consuming once you kind of jumped on that? |
**Alexander Neumann:** This deduplication thing was built into Restic right from the beginning, because at first I thought "Oh, I'd like to have a backup program", and then I started thinking about it and discussing with my colleagues what should a backup program do, and one of the things that you have in a backup prog... |
So I started looking into algorithms that try to detect changes or similarities in data, and one of the ideas that have been built into this is this really old tool called `rsync`. There's a PhD thesis by somebody called Andrew, I think... I've forgotten the name. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.