I am using kopia since about 2 years. (for the records: I was coming from borg)
Last week I purchased a Hetzner Storage Box to do some archiving of very important data. Hetzner supports SFTP protocol, which is good for kopia. So I was investigating about how kopia is best setup with sftp.
During this investigation I found an interesting thread in the kopia forum saying that kopia is not recovering well from missing blobs in the repo (link at the bottom). I did my own tests and actually could verify that kopia indeed has a problem with missing or corrupt blobs.
The files suffering from a missing blob can not be recovered (that is normel. restic and borg can not recover such files either). The issue is visible with a new backup resp. snapshot. kopia is not putting the correct file from the source back into the repo. The file stays corrupt in the repo even with new backups. Forever corrupt.
I have also tested restic. And restic is doing a much better job in that regard. A new backup puts the file back into the repo and fixes everything. Even the old snapshots in the repo have no corrupt file anymore.
I am wondering how borg is behaving in this scenario. Does anyone want to test this? My test scenario is simple and I describe it in post #15 in this thread in the kopia forum:
PS
This topic actually made me think of abandoning kopia in favor of restic. I am currently doing extensive testing with local and remote repos. I start to like restic. It is much easier to handle than kopia. And it seems to be much more stable when it comes to repairing broken repos.
I tried to use Kopia for a couple of weeks. Couldn’t get it to work properly after a reboot. It would work fine on initial setup, then fail after reboot. It couldn’t connect reliably to my local NAS.
I even opened an issue on their github. 3 weeks later nobody has even acknowledged my report.
Their github is full of bug reports that the dev is ignoring.
I moved to Vorta/Borg and it’s been flawless. I don’t use SFTP though, so I can’t comment on that.
Just for clarification: The issue I am describing here and in the kopia forum is not related to sftp. It happens also on local filesystem. My verfication of the issue is based on local filesystem repos.
I am interested to see how borg behaves in this scenario. My borg knowledge is outdated. I can not remember even the basics. Therefore I was wondering if borg users here in the forum mind to test the scenario.
From my understanding, a core functionality of Vorta/Borg is it can connect to any repository that validates with an SSH key. It also works with local repositories (which is what I’m using).
Have used Borg in the past with Vorta as a frontend, now just use rsync and then a backup to a NAS and encrypted cloud. If you search for Vorta+Borg, you’ll find old posts about it.
please do not hijack this thread. This thread is about a specific topic regarding the recovery of missing blobs in a kopia, borg, restic repository. For any other topic feel free to open a separate thread.