The Bvckup blog is the dev blog for Bvckup 2, a Windows file backup and replication tool.
HN commenters praise Bvckup 2 as a well-designed, fairly priced Windows app, and one says other software copies its look.
This is extremely unfortunate, yet feels like it could have been prevented rather easily.
Most of the hypervisors support snapshotting of various types, many OSes out there have built in backup solutions, even some file systems support snapshots as well, that can be restored, everything from pooled file systems to even RAID could have helped them deal with the failure of a disk. And perhaps not applicable here, cloud vendors also support backups most of the time.
Though personally, even a simple software solution can help with backups, personally i use BackupPC: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
Basically, it's just some nice logic that's built around rsync and has compression, incremental backups etc. I set it up a few years ago for all of my cloud servers and VMs (which i manually add to the list of ones that are backed up), create system users for them for SSH access and occasionally check whether the incremental/full backups are working. Then, i simply have another rsync script that copies the backup server's data over periodically to another device.
It's not the most advanced setup, but even that is better than just hoping that no data loss will happen, which is plain wrong. Then there's also software solutions like https://bvckup2.com/ for desktops etc. Of course, rsync and cron would have also been sufficient.
It's not like backups aren't essentially a solved problem in most of the simple configurations.
No, no. A proper setup is like this -
1. Keep TC container in a non-shared location on local disk
2. Mount it, keep it mounted
3. Periodically backup this location to your Dropbox folder
Now, the trick is to use backup software that is capable of
(a) shadow copying
(b) incremental file updates
Shadow copying works around .tc file being locked.
Incremental updating keeps things quick.
The only Windows software I know that is capable of this is Bvckup 2 - http://bvckup2.com
(I posted this earlier, but then deleted the post as it read kind of spammy. But this is the way to handle TC container backup, so here it is again. And that's one gem of a backup program too, totally worth a plug).
>https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-preferences.gif
>https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-backup-settings.gif
>https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-backup-verification-dialog-r2.gif
UI elements jumping and moving around like that are absolute hell for usability. It denies muscle memory, demands eye tracking (and good eyesight in general), and keeps users on edge because things keep changing.
>https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-rabbit-hole.gif
I'm failing to see the point of that dropdown (well, dropup) menu. The space is there from the beginning, but as unused and wasted whitespace. Why the unnecessary button and associated UI movements?
Let me chime in and say that plain Win32 API is a perfectly viable option if you are using C++ (or another "OO" language) and if you are willing to sink a couple of weeks into writing your own MFC-like wrapper.
Clearly this is not an option for those who are just starting up with Windows GUI work, but with little experience it is really a matter of 2-3 weeks of ground work and then you have full control over all nuances of the UI, yours to extend and mend as you wish.
I have some examples from 10+ years of development updates accumulated here - https://bvckup2.com/wip
Looks nice and kudos for sticking with Objective-C. Still a nice language which compiles quickly (well, any language compiles quickly compared to Swift).
The visuals and attention to detail reminded me of Bvckup (https://bvckup2.com).
Downloaded the app to check the "smooth caret" somebody mentioned, started typing and got interrupted after 3 words by a popup telling me to check out PRO features. Oh well. Next, a OS popup about notifications... no thanks. I don't expect any notifications from a text editor. Or at least give me a minute to check it out on my own.
I really like the animations. Well done.
> https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-rabbit-hole.gif
This one does confuse me though. Why not have the sidebar display permanently instead of hiding it within a drop-down? There already appears to be white space and a column header ("More options...") dedicated to it already. Also, why is the button label pi? It's all just really confusing and feels unintuitive. I imagine some thought went into it though, so I'm curious as to the reasoning behind it.
Other than that one particular case, I like what you've done with the rest.