Attic: A Simple Backup Tool That Doesn’t Pretend to Be More Than It Is

Let’s be honest — Attic isn’t the newest or flashiest backup tool out there. It’s not trying to be cloud-native or smart or “enterprise-ready.” What it does offer is something many admins still want: quiet, repeatable backups with deduplication, straight from the terminal.

No GUIs, no daemons, no nonsense.

You give it a path and a repo location — local or remote — and it stores exactly what changed since the last run. Efficiently. With compression. And without asking a million questions.

So Why Use It?

Because sometimes that’s all you need.

Maybe you’ve got a staging box that dumps logs every day. Or a set of configs you don’t want to re-copy nightly. Or an old home NAS with SSH but no Docker, no systemd, just bash and cron.

Attic fits into that world perfectly. It’s like rsync’s smarter cousin — it notices what’s changed and stores only the differences, chunk by chunk. It doesn’t care if the filename changed — only the content matters.

Typical Flow (Once You’ve Got It Set Up)

Let’s say you want to back up /etc and /var/log every night to a local repo:

attic create /mnt/backups::daily-$(date +%F) /etc /var/log

That’s it.

You can list old archives, extract individual files, or mount them (yes, mount) if you want to poke around.

Add it to cron, maybe redirect output to syslog or a file, and you’re done.

Things That Caught Me Off Guard

– It’s actually fast, even over SSH — as long as your first backup is done

– Compression is configurable (lz4, zlib, or none)

– You don’t need root unless you’re backing up system-wide stuff

– The repo is just a regular folder — easy to rsync elsewhere

– Deduplication is content-aware — it skips identical blocks even if filenames change

Honestly, for backing up dev environments, small servers, or local directories — it just works.

But Also…

– Yeah, it’s abandoned. The last real commit was years ago.

– It doesn’t support pruning or retention out of the box. You’ll have to script that part.

– No official Windows version, though WSL might work in a pinch.

If that’s a dealbreaker — check out BorgBackup, which is a maintained fork with more features. But if all you need is “back this up efficiently and don’t waste my bandwidth,” Attic still does the job.