Pika Backup is an app focused on backups of personal data. It’s internally based on BorgBackup and provides fast incremental backups.
Last year, Pika Backup crossed the mark of 100,000 downloads on Flatub. These are numbers I couldn’t have imagined when submitting Pika Backup to Flathub only about three years ago. Thanks to everyone who has supported the project along the way. Be it with incredibly kind feedback, helpful issue reports, or financial contributions on Open Collective. It has been a blast so far. A special thanks goes to BorgBase who generously has been giving financial support to the project development for over a year now.
While we still have a bunch of features planned for Pika Backup, our focus remains stability and keeping the codebase maintainable. The project was started over five years ago. Since these were still the early ages of Rust as a programming language within GNOME, a lot has changed in the way app code is commonly structured. This means that we are also planning some refactoring work to help with the maintainability and readability of the code for future contributors.
After being blocked by a nasty bug for a while, we are finally releasing Pika Backup 0.7 today. Like the previous release, the new release has substantially been driven by Fina since I have been busy with other projects including moving flats. I’m thrilled that the project has two maintainers who are familiar with the codebase. The new release contains over 20 significant changes and fixes. The most noticeable new features are:
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- A new preferences window to rename backup configurations and allow scheduled backups with the system running on battery.
- The ability to automatically run scripts before and after creating a backup.
- A new feature to check the backup repositories’ integrity.
You can financially support development on Open Collective or GitHub. If you want to support my general GNOME endeavors and get some behind-the-scenes updates, you can support me on my new Patreon.
If you want to try out BorgBase for hosting your backup you can get 10 GB storage for free on borgbase.com. A guide for setting up Pika Backup with BorgBase is available as well.
Thank you for working on this lovely tool!
Yes, excellent program, it has saved me a few times!
Hi Sophie,
Using your wonderful program Pika Backup on Fedora workstation, unfortunately I get an error trying to access my repository which I have saved on my Android smartphone SD card (Samsung s10). It says: Failed to configure repository. Cache.Repository replay. Cache, or information obtained from
security directory is newer than repository – this is either an attack or unsafe (multiple repos with same ID).
Basically, I can’t access my backup, please help! :-)
Kind regards, Anthony
Hi Anthony,
this sounds like you have used a copy of the backup repository on a different location, after storing it on the SD?
You can probably resolve this issue by calling “rm ~/.var/app/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup/cache/borg/” if you are using Flatpak.
For proper support, please use our issue tracker https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/pika-backup
Hi, yes that’s right, I copied it over to my local harddrive because the SD in my smartphone is incredibly slow.
I would think it’s normal for people to move the backup repositories to different places (offsite) and then in future be able to copy them back to a faster drive to process them in case of need, and have it work perfectly (without having to lose time searching for that solution you kindly gave me).
Will you be looking at improving a repository’s “mobility” in a future version? It’s incredibly frightening for newbie Linux users like me to see an error message that makes them think their backup is corrupt, just when one needs it !
Copying the backup and then continue to write backups to a different location will probably be possible with BorgBackup 2.0. BorgBackup 1.x has fundamental limitations wrt this due to it’s encryption architecture.
Once again, please use our issue tracker for support.
ok, thanks, sounds positive! When do you think you will have BorgBackup 2.0 incorporated into Pika Backup? (just an approximation)! :-)
BorgBackup 2.0 is not released yet. So this is not our under control.
Sophie,
So far, I love this tool. I’ve been using Back In Time for years and this is sooo much faster. Especially on the incrementals. The only thing I miss is the ability to set a specific time for weekly’s. Is there any chance that Pika will be implementing the ability to designate a specific time for weekly and monthly backups? I don’t want the weekly’s to: 1. run while I’m trying to work. 2. step on my nightly, which runs at 22:00. Has anyone else shown interest in this, or am I just ‘particular’? :)
Kevin