plakar

plakar - Effortless backup & more

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🔄 Latest Release

V1.0.5 - Minor Release: Refinements, Hooks, Build Improvements (October 15, 2025)

• Build & Packaging Improvements: Homebrew packaging fixed for macOS, added Windows builds, and multiple dependency updates for a more robust development environment.
• UI & Documentation Updates: New social links, updated documentation, synced Plakar UI to latest revision, improved asset serving, and enhanced manual pages.
• Pipeline & Concurrency Tuning: Adjusted backup pipeline concurrency for better stability and resource usage.
• Backup Hooks & Sync Enhancements: Added pre-hook, post-hook, and fail-hook support for backup commands, including Windows compatibility. Introduced passphrase_cmd for sync operations.
• Maintenance & Internal Refinements: Improved type safety, clearer messaging, better login clarifications, enhanced error handling, cache-mem-size parameter, and miscellaneous bug fixes.
• New Contributors: Welcome to @pata27 for their first contribution!

📝 Release article

V1.0.4 - Major Release: Plugins, Windows, Packages, Performance (September 16, 2025)

• Pre-packaged binaries for easy installs: .deb, .rpm, .apk, plus static tarballs.
  Package repositories coming right after to install via apt, yum, or apk.
• Initial Windows support: Plakar now runs natively on Windows, including CLI and UI.
  Current limitation: one concurrent operation per agent, as multi-agent support is coming next.
• Integrations as plugins with plakar pkg add <integration>
  Example: plakar pkg add s3, plakar pkg add sftp, plakar pkg add gcp, imap, ftp, ...
• Smarter agent: auto-spawn and auto-teardown after idle for frictionless concurrency.
• Cache improvements: fewer disk hits, lower footprint, better accuracy on very large corpora.
• Performance boosts across backup, check, restore: faster indexing, traversal, data access, and dedupe pipelines.
  From x2 to x10 depending on workloads.
• Policy-based lifecycle via plakar prune
  Examples:
  plakar prune -days 2 -per-day 3 -weeks 4 -per-week 5 -months 3 -per-month 2
plakar prune -tags finance -per-day 5
• UI refinements: cleaner layouts, clearer hierarchy, better progress and error messages.
  Try the demo: https://demo.plakar.io

📝 Release article

🧭 Introduction

plakar provides an intuitive, powerful, and scalable backup solution.

Plakar goes beyond file-level backups. It captures application data with its full context.

Data and context are stored using Kloset, an open-source, immutable data store that enables the implementation of advanced data protection scenarios.

Plakar's main strengths:

• Effortless: Easy to use, clean default. Check out our quick start guide.
• Secure: Provide audited end-to-end encryption for data and metadata. See our latest crypto audit report.
• Reliable: Backups are stored in Kloset, an open-source immutable data store. Learn more about Kloset.
• Vertically scalable: Backup and restore very large datasets with limited RAM usage.
• Horizontally scalable: Support high concurrency and multiple backups type in a single Kloset.
• Browsable: Browse, sort, search, and compare backups using the Plakar UI.
• Fast: backup, check, sync and restore are operations are optimized for large-scale data.
• Efficient: more restore points, less storage, thanks to Kloset's unmatched deduplication and compression.
• Open Source and actively maintained: open source forever and now maintained by Plakar Korp

Simplicity and efficiency are plakar's main priorities.

Our mission is to set a new standard for effortless secure data protection.

🖥️ Plakar UI

Plakar includes a built-in web-based user interface to monitor, browse, and restore your backups with ease.

🚀 Launch the UI

You can start the interface from any machine with access to your backups:

$ plakar ui

📂 Snapshot Overview

Quickly list all available snapshots and explore them:

🔍 Granular Browsing

Navigate the contents of each snapshot to inspect, compare, or selectively restore files:

📦 Installing the CLI

From binaries

Visit https://www.plakar.io/download/

From source

plakar requires Go 1.23.3 or higher, it may work on older versions but hasn't been tested.

go install github.com/PlakarKorp/plakar@latest

🚀 Quickstart

plakar quickstart: https://www.plakar.io/docs/v1.0.4/quickstart/

A taste of plakar (please follow the quickstart to begin):

$ plakar at /var/backups create                             # Create a repository
$ plakar at /var/backups backup /private/etc                # Backup /private/etc
$ plakar at /var/backups ls                                 # List all repository backup
$ plakar at /var/backups restore -to /tmp/restore 9abc3294  # Restore a backup to /tmp/restore
$ plakar at /var/backups ui                                 # Start the UI
$ plakar at /var/backups sync to @s3                        # Synchronise a backup repository to S3

🧠 Notable Capabilities

• Instant recovery: Instantly mount large backups on any devices without full restoration.
• Distributed backup: Kloset can be easily distributed to implement 3,2,1 rule or advanced strategies (push, pull, sync) across heterogeneous environments.
• Granular restore: Restore a complete snapshot or only a subset of your data.
• Cross-storage restore: Back up from one storage type (e.g., S3-compatible object store) and restore to another (e.g., file system)..
• Production safe-guarding: Automatically adjusts backup speed to avoid impacting production workloads.
• Lock-free maintenance: Perform garbage collection without interrupting backup or restore operations.
• Integrations: back up and restore from and to any source (file systems, object stores, SaaS applications...) with the right integration.

🗄️ Plakar archive format : ptar

ptar is Plakar’s lightweight, high-performance archive format for secure and efficient backup snapshots.

Kapsul is a companion tool that lets you run most plakar sub-commands directly on a .ptar archive without extracting it. It mounts the archive in memory as a read-only Plakar repository, enabling transparent and efficient inspection, restoration, and diffing of snapshots.

For installation, usage examples, and full documentation, see the Kapsul repository.

📚 Documentation

For the latest information, you can read the documentation available at https://www.plakar.io/docs/v1.0.4/

💬 Community

• 🗨️ Join our very active Discord
• 📣 Follow our subreddit r/plakar
• ▶️ Subscribe to our YouTube channel @PlakarKorp