Top all-time · #1877
Lars Wirzenius
Personal blog · liw.fiprogrammingsystems
Lars Wirzenius's personal blog at liw.fi covers programming and systems. Since 2011, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “Obnam, a snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Lars Wirzenius's site hosts the Obnam backup software pages and his Linux 20-years anecdotes from the early days of Linux. HN readers link it for Obnam and those early Linux stories.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Obnam called great, awesome and a good choice; the Linux 20 anecdotes read fondly and called of interest.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Obnam, a snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-06-01
- Re-thinking electronic mail4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-10-25
- /linux20/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-03
- Linux News #3 First Intervirw with Linus( 1992)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-14
- /linux-anecdotes/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-10-27
- Writing Manual Pages (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-11
- Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-19
- Linux 20 Years: Anecdotes from 19982 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-11
- I'd like to review your README2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-17
- Writing manual pages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-08
What Hacker News says?
I think that's the case. Note: https://github.com/bup/bup does that too (though it does not encrypt), and http://liw.fi/obnam/ does too (and it does encrypt). What tarsnap gives you that obnam doesn't is (a) managed cloud storage, (b) tarsnap's history and reputation, and (c) Colin's personal reputation. That's a lot, and it costs money above the S3 storage costs (which you could point obnam at).
Comment linking /obnam/
on “What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap”Submitted I'd like to review your README as a story · 336 points
HN discussionSee also, by the same author: https://liw.fi/linux20
Comment linking /linux20
on “The early days of Linux (2023)”Submitted 40 Years of Programming as a story · 242 points
HN discussionMakes me think of this anecdote from Linus Torvalds' officemate, from (1) > At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phon…
Comment linking /linux-anecdotes/
on “Modifying an HDMI dummy plug's EDID using a Raspberry Pi”Submitted Re-thinking electronic mail as a story · 123 points
HN discussionI take you start from the raspbian base image and customize your rootfs from there. Maybe take a look at the various debian bootstrap methods then you can create minimal sd-images and even apply some changes to the root fs and partition table before booting the rpi. This way you could implement encryption of the root partition or specification of partition size etc. Here is one of the many bootstrap methods: http://…
Comment linking /vmdebootstrap/
on “PiBakery – a blocks based, easy to use setup tool for Raspberry Pi”Submitted Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionThis is not my field of expertise, so forgive me if im mistaken, but isnt 'Ohad Rodeh B-trees'[1] a simple and more elegant solution than a journal/WAL? As far as i know its already used in Linux Btrfs and in LMDB, and i wonder why, if they were designing this from scratch, why they didnt go for this in the first place. Familiarity perhaps? By the way i have code that deals with the SQLite Btree directly and by read…
Comment linking /larch/ohad-btrees-shadowing-clones.pdf
on “The design of littlefs: A fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers”Submitted Linux 20 Years: Anecdotes from 1998 as a story · 74 points
HN discussionA few months back I was wiping some old drives using a USB->SATA adapter plugged into an old Linux machine I keep around for experimenting on random things. Mostly because I could just leave it to run for however long it took. There were two drives in the machine, sda and sdb. So the drive came up as sdc. So then I typed: $ shred -n1 -v /dev/sda Took me about 4 seconds to realize what I did before hitting Ctrl-C. Th…
Comment linking /linux-anecdotes/
on “Suicide Linux”Submitted How to Get Out of Vi (2015) as a story · 46 points
HN discussiondirvish is dead. Use obnam http://liw.fi/obnam/
Comment linking /obnam/
on “Dear USA, my data has left your building”Submitted Writing Manual Pages (2019) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionhttps://liw.fi/vi/
Comment linking /vi/
on “Big Pile of Vim-Like”Submitted Re-thinking electronic mail (2022) as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> Linus and Linux If you consider who the OP is, you realise they know Linus and Linux better than almost anyone else: https://liw.fi/linux20/
Comment linking /linux20/
on “40 Years of Programming”Submitted Linux at 20, some personal memories (by Lars Wirzenius) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionObnam is also great: http://liw.fi/obnam/ This does deduplication, but can also encrypt the deduplicated blocks and store them on (say) S3.
Comment linking /obnam/
on “Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfile format”Submitted Linux News #3 First Intervirw with Linus( 1992) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI hear about rdiff-backup, but I think its two main drawbacks are: * on the webpage, there is no new release since 2009. * has no de-duplication. I was considering moving my 5+ years old rdiff-backup system to any of those new, promising programs: * obnam [ http://liw.fi/obnam/ ] * attic [ https://pythonhosted.org/Attic/ ] They both do automatic de-duplication, old backup deletion and remote encryption.
Comment linking /obnam/
on “Bup: Efficient file backup system based on the git packfile format”Submitted Re-Thinking Electronic Mail as a story · 5 points
HN discussionduplicity is nice, but it doesn't do dedupe. It's also slow. I currently prefer http://liw.fi/obnam/ which does dedupe and every backup is a snapshot. Only downside is that encrypted backups are broken if you use the latest gpg.
Comment linking /obnam/
on “Duplicity + S3: Easy, cheap, encrypted, automated full-disk backups”Submitted Re-thinking electronic mail (2022) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionObnam uses gpg for encryption. The only novel thing is its use of symmetric encryption keys which are used to encrypt the data and are included in the backup repository, encrypted by your regular private gpg key. This allows giving additional gpg keys access to the backup after it has been made. http://liw.fi/obnam/encryption/ (Which is useful for eg, backing up a server. You can make a dedicated gpg key for that se…
Comment linking /obnam/encryption/
on “Best Linux server backup system?”Submitted Re-Thinking Electronic Mail as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have been keeping a journal in a private ikiwiki instance for several years now. Basically, I set up an ikiwiki blog that generates a static website, served by Apache over localhost. Files are in markdown, and kept in git. I do searches via "git grep". The static site is for easier browsing. I've added things like "topics" (sub-blogs based on links to a topic page) and "people" (ditto). A topic is a page and autom…
Comment linking /obnam/journal-dump/
on “How to Keep a Journal”Submitted Writing manual pages as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. Fr…
Comment linking /linux-anecdotes/
on “How to delete all your files”Submitted Distix development as performance art as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
