Nephele WebDAV Server now supports deduplicated file storage.
Nephele WebDAV Server now supports deduplicated file storage.
https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
In the latest version of Nephele, you can now create a WebDAV server that deduplicates files that you add to it.
I created this feature because every night at midnight, my Minecraft world that my friends and I play on gets backed up. Our world has grown to about 5 GB, but every night, the same files get backed up over and over. It's a waste of space to store the same files again and again, but I want the ability to roll back our world to any day in the past.
So with this new feature of Nephele, I can upload the Minecraft backup and only the files that have changed will take up additional space. It's like having infinite incremental backups that never need a full backup after the first time, and can be accessed instantly.
Nephele will only delete a file from the file storage once all copies that share the same file contents have been deleted, so unlike with most incremental backup solutions, you can delete previous backups easily and regain space.
Edit: So, I think my post is causing some confusion. I should make it clear that my use case is specific for me. This is a general purpose deduplicating file server. It will take any files you give it and deduplicate them in its storage. It's not a backup system, and it's not a versioning system. My use case is only one of many you can use a deduplicating file server for.
Cool, but you basically reinvented btrfs snapshots.
Not at all. Btrfs snapshots:
- aren't accessible unless you revert to them
- only happen when you manually trigger them
- don't deduplicate files in the file system, just across snapshots
- are handled at the file-system level (meaning you'd have to create a separate file system, or at least a separate subvolume if you're already using btrfs, to make them with an exclusive set of files)
- don't have access controls beyond Linux' basic file controls (so sharing a server will be complicated)
- aren't served across the network (you can serve a btrfs file system, but then you can't access a previous snapshot)
- aren't portable (you can't just copy a set of files to a new server, you have to image the partition)
They serve a very different purpose than a deduplicating file server. Now, there are other deduplicating file servers, but I don't know of any that are open source and run on Linux.
Actually you seem to have reinvented Syncthing's versioning feature... or this.
Still great work.
No, please research what deduplication is before commenting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication
You might be thinking of incremental backups which also saves space but is not the same thing.
If you for example ran deduplication on a file server and a bunch of users uploaded the same files in multiple different directories, deduplication would remove all duplicate copies and just link them together. This has nothing to do with snapshots. btrfs might support deduplication but now this software does too. Your comment was completely unnecessary since not everything in the world can or should run btrfs
That's a great feature! Currently I am way too invested in Nextcloud ecosystem to try anything else. But if I ever want to leave Nextcloud for a simple webdav server, this will be my consideration!
I looked into a bit more, and the fact that I can put it on top of an S3 compatible filesystem, with encryption and deduplication, is huge. I am seriously considering it as a backup system now.
Thank you. You just saved me from troubleshooting headaches with the other webdav. P.S., I uses the docker version with SSL cert on Unraid.
Is there a link?
Also, how does this compare to something like Borg?
Here you go:
https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
So Borg is a backup solution. It will perform backups for you (as well as doing deduplication). This is just a deduplicating file server. It will take whatever you put in it, backups, videos, documents, etc. and deduplicate them. In my case, that's what I needed, not a complete backup solution like Borg.
Ah that makes much more sense. I think I crossed my wires. You mentioned backing up the Minecraft worlds and so I thought "deduplicated backups... so borg."
I appreciate your explanation.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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