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Mirror backups · free and open source

bupr

Preset-based mirror backups for the macOS terminal.

brew install dfallman/tap/bupr

View on GitHub macOS

About

Bupr mirrors folders on your Mac to an external drive or a mounted NAS, quickly and safely. Describe each backup once in a small TOML file, then run it by name: bupr dev mirrors ~/dev to your backup drive.

It knows what your tools can regenerate. A target/ folder is skipped only when a Cargo.toml sits next to it, and node_modules/ only beside a package.json, while your .git folders, lockfiles, and .env files are kept. That often turns 100 GB of projects into a backup of a few.

What it does

  • Presets, not scripts

    No long rsync command where one missing backslash silently breaks it. bupr new walks you through a preset.

  • Project-aware excludes

    Skips only what can be regenerated. bupr audit shows what is left out, and why.

  • Live dashboard

    Progress, speed, ETA, and the files being copied. Later runs copy only what changed.

  • Preview a run

    --dry-run shows the plan. --simulate reads every file and writes nothing, to find errors and time the run.

  • Safety first

    Independent layers, down to a kernel sandbox around the copier, keep every write inside the backup folder.

  • Runs unattended

    Schedule it with launchd. --all skips drives that aren’t plugged in, and exit codes tell a script what happened.

Who’s it for?

  • Developers with many projects

    Back up ~/dev without copying gigabytes of node_modules/ and target/ folders every time.

  • An external drive or a NAS

    A plain mirror you can open in Finder and copy back from, file by file, on any Mac.

  • Burned by rsync before

    The speed of a mirror, with presets, previews, and guard rails in place of a fragile one-liner.

Install

With Homebrew:

brew install dfallman/tap/bupr

Or download a ready-made build for macOS from the latest release, or build it from the source on GitHub.

Try it

bupr initbupr dev --dry-run

The first writes a starter config to ~/.config/bupr/config.toml. The second shows what a backup would copy and delete, without touching anything.

Bupr is free and open source under the MIT licence. Read the source, report an issue, or contribute on GitHub.