The BorgBase team has introduced Vykar, a new open-source backup tool written in Rust that outperforms Borg, Restic, and others in speed tests. Released under the GPL-3.0 license, it features encryption, deduplication, and a built-in desktop GUI. Performance benchmarks show it completing backups faster while using more memory.
Vykar is an encrypted, deduplicated backup tool developed by the BorgBase team, creators of a managed repository service for Borg and Restic. Unlike those tools, Vykar uses its own repository format and is configured via a single YAML file defining repositories, source directories, encryption, and retention policies. It draws inspiration from BorgBackup and Borgmatic but stands apart with first-party features like vykar-gui, a desktop interface with system tray support for on-demand and scheduled backups, and a WebDAV server for browsing snapshots. Key capabilities include scheduling through a vykar daemon, FastCDC deduplication, LZ4 or Zstandard compression, AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption with Argon2id key derivation, and support for concurrent multi-client backups to the same repository. Storage backends encompass local filesystems, S3-compatible object storage, SFTP, and a REST server. In benchmarks on a 49 GiB dataset of 367,000 files, Vykar backed up in 61 seconds and restored in 69 seconds, beating Borg (268s backup, 225s restore), Restic (138s backup, 130s restore), Kopia (85s backup, 132s restore), and Rustic (313s backup, 82s restore). It used 234 CPU seconds for backup, less than competitors, but required 623 MB memory versus Borg's 236 MB. Repository sizes ranged 19.7-19.9 GB across tools with Zstd compression. Pre-built binaries are available for Linux (x86_64, aarch64 with glibc or musl), macOS on Apple Silicon, and Windows via GitHub releases, alongside Cargo installation.