bup vs Duplicacy

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted backup & recovery options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
FeaturebupDuplicacy
CategoryBackup & RecoveryBackup & Recovery
LicenseLGPL-2.1Proprietary
LanguagePythonGo
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM128 MB256 MB
Deploymentbinarybinary, docker
GitHub stars★ 7,337★ 5,671
First released20102016
ReplacesTime MachineBackblaze, Carbonite

Why pick each one

Choose bup if…

  • Released under the LGPL-2.1 license
  • Mature project with 7.3k GitHub stars
  • Written in Python
  • Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
bup details

Choose Duplicacy if…

  • Efficient deduplication
  • Good cloud support
  • Reliable
Duplicacy details

Frequently asked questions

Is bup or Duplicacy better?

Neither is universally better. bup has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are bup and Duplicacy free and open-source?

Yes. bup is licensed under LGPL-2.1 and Duplicacy under Proprietary. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run bup and Duplicacy with Docker?

bup: check the project docs for container support. Duplicacy: yes.

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