Vykar Backup

A fast, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust centered around a friendly YAML config file.

Inspired by BorgBackup, Borgmatic, Restic, and Rustic. Vykar uses its own on-disk format and is not compatible with Borg or Restic repositories.

⚠️ Don't use for production backups yet, but do test it along other backup tools.

Features

• Fast — fastest backup and restore of the tools we benchmarked, at the lowest CPU cost
• Encrypted by default — client-side AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305; the storage never sees your keys
• Deduplicated and compressed — content-defined chunking with LZ4 or Zstandard keeps incremental backups small
• One YAML file — repositories, sources, retention, excludes, and schedule, with hooks for monitoring and command dumps for databases
• Storage backends — local filesystem, S3 (any compatible provider), SFTP, or the dedicated REST server
• Verifiable — full or sampled integrity checks, repair, a redundant repository key, and restore that salvages around damage
• Append-only storage — REST server with append-only enforcement, quotas, and server-side compaction, or S3 Object Lock
• Find and restore — search files across snapshots, browse via built-in WebDAV and web UI, or use the desktop GUI
• Runs unattended — built-in scheduler (interval or cron) with a read-only HTTP status page, resource limits, and concurrent backups from multiple machines
• Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, and Windows; single binary, Docker image, Ansible role

Benchmarks

Vykar leads in both speed and CPU efficiency, while maintaining competitive memory usage.

All benchmarks were run on the same idle Intel i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz machine with 2x Samsung PM981 NVMe drives. Compression settings were chosen to keep resulting repository sizes comparable. The sample corpus is a mix of small and large files with varying compressibility. See our benchmark script for full details.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://vykar.borgbase.com/install.sh | sh

Or download the latest release for your platform from the releases page. A Docker image is also available.

# Generate a starter config and edit it
vykar config

# Initialize the repository and run a backup
vykar init
vykar backup

# List snapshots
vykar list

See the full documentation for storage backends, restore, maintenance, and more.

Desktop UI

vykar-gui is a Slint-based desktop app that uses vykar-core directly (it does not shell out to the CLI).

• Run backups on demand
• List snapshots and browse snapshot contents
• Extract snapshot contents
• Run in the system tray with periodic background backups
• Uses vykar.yaml as the source of truth and auto-reloads config changes

Periodic GUI scheduling is configured in vykar.yaml via:

schedule:
  enabled: true
  every: "24h"
  on_startup: false
  jitter_seconds: 0

Security

To report a security vulnerability, please email hello@borgbase.com.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0