🎉 elkarbackup is back! 🎉

[Andreas Thienemann]

[This is a courtesy copy of an announcement posted on GitHub at https://github.com/elkarbackup/elkarbackup/discussions/695]

Hello everyone 👋

I’m happy to announce that elkarbackup is active again, with a new maintainer and fresh energy behind the project.


🧰 A quick look back

For many years, elkarbackup has been a very useful tool for managing rsnapshot-based backups across multiple machines. It filled a niche that surprisingly few tools cover well: centrally managed, pull-based backups with a clean UI on top of a proven and boring (in the good sense!) backend.

There hasn't been a lot of work done on elkarbackup since 2021 and in 2023 the project was officially retired. The previous team simply didn’t have the resources anymore to keep maintaining it — something many of us in open source can relate to ❤️

Despite that, elkarbackup never really went away. Many users (myself included) kept running it in production because it still scratches an itch that other tools don’t quite satisfy.
In my own case, elkarbackup is used for off-site, pull-only backups that act as disaster recovery backups. But I know this is just one use-case — I’d love to hear how you are using elkarbackup today, so please feel free to share below 💬


🔧 How this revival started

Since 2023, I’ve been maintaining my own fork with a handful of minor changes and bugfixes for issues that affected me personally. For a long time, that fork lived quietly.

Only recently did I mention it in public at which point @xezpeleta was kind enough to reach out and ask about possibly reviving the project.

And well… why not? 🙂
I was already working on the code anyway.
So with that: welcome back, elkarbackup 🚀


🙌 Thanks & recent progress

First of all, huge thanks to the initial developers @elkarbackup/core.
A big thank you to @xezpeleta again, who did the initial commit after unfreezing the project:

- updated the Docker base image
- updated several packages
- provided a freshly built snapshot
Thank you for that 👏

Since then, I’ve:
- added several improvements from my old fork
- fixed a number of bugs
- merged some community contributions
- closed a few long-standing issues
- identified a couple of areas worth improving

One big win is that the project now has the beginnings of a real end-to-end test suite 🎯
This already makes it much easier to see whether a new PR works or breaks things, and it should help a lot going forward.

That groundwork also allowed me to:
- update more dependencies
- cut a few new releases
- Identify a few PRs that need more work

🛠️ What’s next?

There are still a few things I want to tackle:
- improving parts of the API
- fixing some display issues
- getting rid of bugs that affect overall stability
- moving elkarbackup onto currently supported frameworks and PHP versions

The main focus going forward will be the Docker container, but I fully expect dpkg releases to make a comeback and I’ll also look into RPM packages, just to offer some variety.


🧱 Stability & long-term vision

Overall, I consider the project pretty stable.

Both elkarbackup and rsnapshot are solid, proven tools that have been around for a long time. I’m not interested in rewriting large parts of the codebase, nor in turning elkarbackup into a frontend for a dozen different backup tools.

I want elkarbackup:

- to do what it already does
- to do it well
- on a solid, modern foundation
- and to be ready for a long future

🤝 Contributions & feature ideas

If you feel there are improvements to be made or features worth adding, I’m more than happy to help anyone who wants to work on meaningful enhancements and guide them through getting things merged.

That said, it’s not my personal goal to implement new features that only serve a very small subset of users. Thoughtful, well-motivated improvements are very welcome — especially if you’re willing to help build them 🙂


💬 Support & discussions going forward

Going forward, GitHub Discussions will be the preferred place to ask for support, discuss use-cases, talk about project direction and share experiences and stories.

I hope this will work better than overloading the issue tracker because once a bug is closed, it's hard for anyone to find it again.


In short:

Issues are for bugs 🐞
PRs are for code improvements 🔧
Discussions are for long-term conversations and shared knowledge 📚
Thanks to everyone who stuck with elkarbackup over the years — and welcome back! ❤️

And a special note on this mailinglist. While I do hope that the GitHub discussion forum takes off because of its better discoverability - especially for new users who are otherwise opening GitHub issues with simple support requests -  this mailinglist is not going anywhere. We'll keep it around as an alternative forum to GitHub.

See you around,

 Andreas

[Eneko Lacunza]

Hello Andreas,

Thank you so much for taking care and reviving this project.

We are retiring elkarbackup internally and in our customers, but still
have various instances running, so your effort is much appreciated.

Thank you!

El 13/12/25 a las 19:16, Andreas Thienemann escribió:

Eneko Lacunza
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Binovo IT Human Project

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