pib – Portable Incremental Backup

pib (for Portable Incremental Backup) is a free backup tool I wrote.

As there already are zillions of backup utilities – what makes this one special?

• Simple: It is just a commandline tool with four different functions: Backup, verify, (re-)create and info.
• Portable: It does not use any external source code or libraries and is written in C (C11). So far it was tested with Linux and Windows, but getting it running on other plattforms shouldn’t be very hard.
• Does exactly what I need (and maybe you like it, too): I never used any backup tools, because they always seemed too complex for the simple task I wanted them to do: Just keep two folders in sync. I am pretty sure you can do that with a lot of tools (like rsync), but I wanted to know exactly how the backup tool works and writing it was fun.

You can get a Windows binary and the source code for free at my GitHub page, there is also a complete description about its functionality.

Additionally to the content at GitHub, here is a little usage example:

1. Create a backup folder somewhere (e.g. on an external drive).

2. Start the initial backup. pib will always tell you what it is doing.

3. Over time, the content of the folder you backed up will change. These are some examples.

4. Next backup: pib tells you, what has changed since last time. You decide, if pib shall proceed and update the backup folder contents to match the source folder (again).

5. Info feature: pib can tell you the files & folders and byte count of any directory.

Hope you like it and maybe it is even useful to you!