ThriftyBackup

ThriftyBackup is a simple incremental cloud backup application for macOS. Because it makes use of rclone under the hood, a wide variety of cloud storage services are supported.

The distinctive feature of ThriftyBackup is that it notifies you when the backup size exceeds a user-configurable threshold. At this point, you can select which of the large files/directories should be included in the backup. This way, you can prevent unnecessarily backing up large files, saving bandwidth and cloud storage space.

⚠️ Warning: ThriftyBackup is currently alpha-quality software. Do not rely on it as your (only) backup solution!

Unfortunately, I also lack the time to develop it into a proper application, but anyone interested is welcome to fork the project and give it a better future.

Some of the other features are:

• (Reverse) incremental backups using rclone's --backup-dir argument
  • this creates copies of files that are updated/removed during an incremental backup
• Basic menu bar app, which
  • shows progress for the backup being performed
  • allows selecting the files to include in a backup exceeding the threshold
  • lists backup configurations and information on recent backups
  • can start ncdu so you can easily browse which files are to be backed up (if the threshold is exceeded), or have been backed up (for recent backups)
  • provides easy access to the configuration and exclude files
• Command line tool to list backup snapshots and their sizes
  • planned: pruning of backups (merges reverse snapshots)

Backup configurations

ThiftyBackup supports multiple backup configurations, allowing for setting individual backup intervals and size thresholds for different sets of file. For each configuration, you specify:

• source: the directory to back up (this can be an external drive)
• destination: where on the cloud storage service to store backups for this backup source
• (optional) backup interval: if not provided, you need to trigger a backup manually
• (optional) size threshold: if not provided, will create a backup regardless of its size

You can also provide an exclude file for each configuration to limit which files and directories will be never be backed up.

Getting started

ThriftyBackup builds on rclone and APFS snapshots, so these need to be set up before you can run it:

• APFS snapshots require Time Machine to be configured for your backup source
  • add a destination for Time Machine backups ('+' in System Settings > General > Time Machine)
    • this can be a tiny USB thumb drive that you won't actually use for backups
  • if you want to back up external drives, remove the volume from the TM exclusion list (Options...) (and add all contents to the exclusion list if you do not want to include the drive in regular TM backups)
• install rclone and configure it for your cloud storage service
• (optional) install ncdu

You also need to grant ThriftyBackup Full Disk Access in System Settings > Privacy & Security.

After all this, you can start ThriftyBackup. On first run, it will create a configuration file which you can open for editing through the ThriftyBackup menu bar app menu. The configuration file includes some further hints.