mapache — Fast, Encrypted, Deduplicating Backup Tool

mapache (Spanish for raccoon 🦝) is a high-performance, deduplicating backup tool designed for speed, reliability, and uncompromising security. Inspired by restic and built with Rust, it provides a modern approach to incremental backups.

Project Status

Mapache is a feature-complete backup solution. While the architecture is designed for reliability and has extensive test coverage, it is a relatively new project. As with any tool managing critical data, users should perform their own validation before relying on it for primary backups.

Key Features

• Performance: parallel multi-threaded backup and restore pipeline. Configurable concurrency for readers and packers.
• Global deduplication: content-defined chunking across all snapshots and machines. Only new data is stored.
• Encryption: AES-256-GCM-SIV with Argon2id key derivation. Data is never stored or transmitted in the clear.
• Zero-config operation: single statically-linked binary, no dependencies. Point it at a directory and run.
• Backends: local filesystem, SFTP, and S3-compatible object storage.
• Terminal UI: interactive TUI with dashboard, snapshot and restore wizards, file explorer, diff viewer, and search across snapshots.
• Restore with control: filter by path or glob pattern, sync mode preserves metadata and permissions. Coalesced reads for efficient transfer.
• FUSE mount: browse snapshot contents and bundle files as a mounted filesystem (Unix).
• Bundles: self-contained encrypted .mapache files with deduplication. Usable for transfer, shipping, or cold storage without access to the repository.
• Multi-client: non-exclusive locking allows multiple hosts to back up to the same repository simultaneously.
• Retention policies: keep what matters with hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rules. Filter by host and tag.
• Integrity verification: end-to-end check of snapshots, packs, and individual blobs.
• Portable: Linux, macOS, Windows and Android — single binary for each platform.

Benchmarks

This is a non-exhaustive set of benchmarks run on my development hardware. They serve as a baseline for comparing performance between versions, using restic v0.19.0 as a base.

Test environment: Fedora 44, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (24 threads), SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe.

Each result is the average of 5 runs following a warmup run, all on local storage. Both tools run with default settings and 8 readers for backup.

Workloads:

• kernel — Linux kernel source tree (~1.6 GB, 99'131 objects)
• enron — Enron email corpus (~1.4 GB, 520'901 objects)

kernel

Tool	Action	Avg Time (s)	Max Time (s)	Avg PSS (MB)	Peak PSS (MB)	Avg CPU (%)	Repo (MB)
mapache	backup	2.06	2.13	307.48	315.11	1358.59	304.14
restic	backup	3.98	4.19	834.90	868.00	1236.80	308.91
mapache	restore	9.03	9.36	410.87	426.94	387.96	--
restic	restore	16.21	16.28	233.82	253.54	149.75	--

enron

Tool	Action	Avg Time (s)	Max Time (s)	Avg PSS (MB)	Peak PSS (MB)	Avg CPU (%)	Repo (MB)
mapache	backup	4.20	4.24	428.77	448.36	1390.57	717.27
restic	backup	10.60	10.75	845.51	881.58	1164.16	725.20
mapache	restore	40.41	41.90	496.44	517.71	395.50	--
restic	restore	73.35	73.66	451.99	459.99	156.32	--

Getting Started

Installation

Quick install (Linux, macOS, Windows):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/jLantxa/mapache/raw/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Or compile from source with the Rust toolchain:

cargo build --release
cargo install --path crates/mapache

cargo build compiles binaries with some dynamically linked dependencies. While this is fine for testing and development on the same hardware, if you need a statically linked binary (which I strongly recommend for portability), run make release-static or use the binaries provided in the Releases page for a specific released version.

Note for Linux users: The mount command requires FUSE development headers (e.g., libfuse-dev). To build without FUSE support, use --no-default-features.

Quick Start

Initialize a repository (local, S3, or SFTP)

# Local directory
mapache init -r /path/to/repo

# SFTP server
mapache init -r sftp://user@host/backup-folder

# S3 Bucket
mapache init -r s3://my-bucket/backup-folder

Create your first snapshot

mapache snapshot ~/Documents -r /path/to/repo

List snapshots

mapache log -c -r /path/to/repo

Restore data

mapache restore --target /tmp/restore-folder -r /path/to/repo