Category: Pika Backup

Pika Backup Hopping Through Milestones

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:

    • 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.

Pika Backup 0.4 Released with Schedule Support

Pika Backup is an app focused on backups of personal data. It’s internally based on BorgBackup and provides fast incremental backups.

Pika Backup version 0.4 has been released today. This release wraps up a year of development work. After the huge jump to supporting scheduled backups and moving to GTK 4 and Libadwaita, I am planning to go back to slightly more frequent and smaller releases. At the same time, well-tested and reliable releases will remain a priority of the project.

Release Overview

The release contains 41 resolved issues, 27 changelog entries, and a codebase that despite many cleanups nearly doubled. Here is a short rundown of the changes.

      • Ability to schedule regular backups.
      • Support for deleting old archives.
      • Revamped graphical interface including a new app icon.
      • Better compression and performance for backups.
      • Several smaller issues rectified.

You can find a more complete list of changes in Pika’s Changelog.

Thanks!

Pika Backup’s backbone is the BorgBackup software. If you want to support them you can check out their funding page. The money will be well spent.

A huge thank you to everyone who helped with this release. Especially Alexander, Fina, Zander, but also everyone else, the borg maintainers, the translators, the beta testers, people who reported issues or contributed ideas, and last but not least, all the people that gave me so much positive and encouraging feedback!

Resources