Guides
Step by step, in the app and in the terminal: free up a drive, file old drives into one archive, merge mailboxes, keep mirrors, use several machines and the swarm, watch drive health, rescue a failing drive, recover deleted files, browse without restoring, see the people and databases on your drives and search inside them, export a chain of custody.
Each guide takes one job from start to finish, with what the app shows and the commands to run. They assume you've installed BackDown and indexed your drives.
Free up a drive
Delete only what has a verified copy elsewhere, move what exists only on the drive first, and see exactly what will happen before anything does.
File your old drives into one archive
Let BackDown propose where everything on your old drives goes in one archive, and why, then copy it there with every file verified. Nothing is deleted.
Merge mailboxes
Turn copies of the same mailbox taken at different times into one Maildir, every message once and in the right folder, and export a folder as mbox. The copies are only read.
Keep a mirror
Keep a folder, usually part of your archive, copied on another drive, with changed files' old copies kept aside and a sample re-read now and then.
Several machines
Let copies on a NAS or another computer count, reached over ssh with your own keys: add a machine, sync it, browse it, gather its drive-health warnings here, and free up drives here against copies there.
The swarm and the pool
Every machine you run BackDown on as one: see each machine's drives and free space, find a file wherever it is, declare pool folders on any of them, and pour an old drive into the pool from any machine, each file copied once and verified, then free the drive.
Drive health
What each drive says about itself, what BackDown can read of it on Linux, macOS and Windows, the warnings and trends it keeps, notifications, other machines' drives gathered here, and what to do when a drive is failing.
Rescue a failing drive
Copy a failing drive or memory card safely, find deleted photos and documents by their contents, and look for lost partitions and the files on them. BackDown only reads the drive.
Recover deleted files
Open a drive's or card's file system directly, see deleted files with their names and how likely each is intact, and copy them out to another drive, checked. FAT, exFAT and NTFS; ext4 by content instead.
Browse without restoring
Open any file on any indexed drive as it was at any scan, read mailboxes as conversations, see SQL dumps as schemas, look inside disk images, and search every drive at once.
Chain of custody
Every copy, move, deletion, link and merge BackDown makes, in a hash-chained log sealed with this computer's key. Export it for evidence handling, and let anyone verify it, with BackDown or without.
People, databases, and searching inside things
See everyone and every database your drives hold, gathered across drives from mail stores, Nextcloud data, home folders, site configs and dumps; then search inside mail and databases, reusing the indexes already there.
Settings, updates and licences
The Settings view, how often drives are rescanned, updates, notifications, running BackDown for the whole machine, and what's free and what's Pro.
Air-gapped machines
BackDown on a computer with no network: a checklist, licences checked offline, and updates carried over on a drive, their signature checked before they're installed.
Signed manifests and attestations
Sign a statement of exactly what a drive held at a scan that anyone can check wasn't changed, have the service sign one after each scan or on a schedule, and check one on another computer, with BackDown or without it.
Last updated · What's released, and what's next