ThriftyBackup: simple incremental cloud backup app for macOS

Hi all :wave:

I have been using rclone for the past couple of years to keep off-site backups of my files in addition to TimeMachine backups to an external drive. What was initially a simple Python script to perform these cloud backups periodically has evolved into a menu bar application for macOS.

ThriftyBackup's distinctive feature is that it warns you when your backup exceeds a given threshold. I implemented this because I was always forgetting to update my exclude file when I added huge files that did not need to be backed up (such as virtual machine disk images).

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If you want to give the app a try, please read the README at the GitHub page. You can download the app bundle here: ThriftyBackup-0.0.1.zip. Note that this is an Apple Silicon app, so it will not run on Intel Macs.

So far, it has only been tested on my own machine. I could have easily missed adding something important in to notes, so please let me know if it doesn't work for you. Unfortunately, the app's stdout/stderr output cannot easily be inspected, so it's not straightforward to debug.

If you are familiar with Python, you can also clone the repository and run app.py with Python. This will also work on Intel Macs. Just make sure to use Python 3.11 and install the dependencies listed in requirements.txt.

@jwink3101 Tagging you because I have the impression you might be interested :slight_smile:

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Thanks for sharing (and tagging me). It seems pretty cool and I like to menubar idea. \

Can you elaborate on the APFS components vs the rclone ones?

It uses APFS snapshots as the source for the rclone sync. This ensures that files do not change during the sync (which can cause some difficulty for rclone), and more importantly, it allows first scouting which files would be synced (rclone dry-run) and then performing the actual sync after checking the threshold and awaiting user feedback.

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This is fantastic! Thank you!

This is very cool! Definitely something I will try. Thx for sharing.

Thanks to @shenzo 's testing, ThriftyBackup-0.0.2.app.zip fixes some major issues.

Hi, is this still working? The zip link doesn't work anymore.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It seems I made a mistake republishing the release on GitHub. The link should be working now.

Thanks, I have edited the Config file to back up 2 different folders, but I can't see anything happening. Do I need to be using AFPS snapshots?

You need to configure Time Machine backups as described in the README (Getting Started).

In its current state, I recommend you run the app from the terminal in order to have view on what's going wrong:

ThriftyBackup.app/Contents/MacOS/ThriftyBackup