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KARTOZA · ZFS BACKUP

Snapshot, send, sleep well.

A terminal UI for ZFS backups that does the careful, encrypted, incremental work for you — and shows you exactly what's happening, dataset by dataset and snapshot by snapshot, while it runs.

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Kartoza ZFS Backup Tool

Why it exists

ZFS already has the right primitives for backups — atomic snapshots, incremental send/receive, bookmarks, native encryption. What's missing for most people is a calm, observable way to drive them. Cron + a wall of stderr is the usual answer; the usual outcome is that nobody notices when the chain breaks.

This tool wraps those primitives in a terminal interface that walks you through the whole flow: import the encrypted destination, snapshot the source, send only what changed, prune the chain, eject the disk. Every step is named, timed, and visualised — including a live snapshot-by-snapshot dot grid so you can see the backup catch up rather than guess.

What you can do with it

  • Incremental backups

    Snapshot the entire source pool and let syncoid send only the changes since the previous run. The destination receives at block level — fast, bandwidth-efficient, and faithful.

    Backup operations

  • Multi-host on one drive

    Every dataset lives under NIXBACKUPS/<hostname>/<dataset> so multiple machines can share one encrypted disk without colliding. Legacy flat layouts are auto-migrated on first run.

    Configuration

  • Pull and push over SSH

    Pull snapshots from a remote machine to a local drive, or push local snapshots to a remote backup server — same UI, same progress reporting, same hostname namespacing.

    Backup operations

  • Browse and restore

    Open any snapshot in a dual-panel file explorer with vim/yazi keybindings, walk the tree, and restore individual files or directories to any location.

    Restore files

  • Encrypted by default

    The destination pool is created with ZFS native AES-256-GCM encryption. The key is prompted for on every import; data at rest is never in clear.

    Configuration

  • Full PDF reports

    After every run, a markdown + PDF report lands in ~/.local/share/zfs-backup/reports/ with timings, sizes, snapshot dot grids, and the full pool inventory.

    Pool information

Install

  • Nix / NixOS

    nix run github:timlinux/zfs-backup — straight from the flake, no install step.

    Installation

  • Linux binary

    Single static binary on the releases page — drop into /usr/local/bin/ and run with sudo.

    Installation

  • From source

    go build inside the nix develop shell. Everything reproducibly pinned via the flake.

    Building

Project status

Docs Release Latest release License

Made with 💗 by Kartoza · Sponsor on GitHub · Repository