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

• Storage backends — local filesystem, S3 (any compatible provider), SFTP, dedicated REST server
• Encryption with AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 (auto-selected) and Argon2id key derivation
• YAML-based configuration with multiple repositories, hooks, and command dumps for monitoring and database backups
• Deduplication via FastCDC content-defined chunking with a memory-optimized engine (tiered dedup index + mmap-backed pack assembly)
• Compression with LZ4 or Zstandard
• Built-in WebDAV and desktop GUI to browse and restore snapshots
• REST server with append-only enforcement, quotas, and server-side compaction
• Concurrent multi-client backups — multiple machines back up to the same repository simultaneously; only the brief commit phase is serialized
• Built-in scheduling via vykar daemon — runs backup cycles on a configurable interval (no cron needed), with an optional read-only HTTP status page
• Resource limits for worker threads, backend connections, and upload/download bandwidth
• Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, and Windows

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
  passphrase_prompt_timeout_seconds: 300

Security

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

License

GNU General Public License v3.0