Standalone timestamped backups — files, folders, symlinks, hardlinks

bkp is a small, dependency-free CLI for fast local backups. Point it at files or directories and get timestamped copies: plain files are duplicated beside the original; directories become a single .tgz (ustar + gzip) that preserves symlinks and hardlinks. Unpack with bkp -x or standard tar.

Written in Odin. Compression uses an embedded miniz (gzip level 1). No system zlib, pigz, or zip required at runtime.

• Timestamped file copies — notes.txt → notes.txt.20260714120000 (like cp -p)
• Directory archives — project/ → project.20260714120000.tgz
• Symlinks & hardlinks — stored correctly in the tar stream (not flattened as ZIP often is)
• Extract mode — bkp -x archive.tgz [dest] restores files, dirs, and links safely
• Parallel entities — -j processes multiple top-level paths at once
• Quiet stdout — only src -> dst lines; errors on stderr
• Multi-arch releases — Linux amd64/arm64, macOS Apple Silicon, Windows amd64

Download from Releases, then:

chmod +x bkp-linux-amd64   # or the asset for your OS
./bkp-linux-amd64 notes.txt src/

Requires Odin and a C compiler (cc / MSVC on Windows).

git clone https://github.com/macedot/bkp.git
cd bkp
make
./bkp

bkp [-j N] [-c N] <file|directory|pattern> ...
bkp -x <archive.tgz> [dest_dir]

No arguments prints usage and exits with code 2. Exit 1 if any path fails.

Stdout is only mapping lines:

src -> dst

# Backup a file and a tree
./bkp notes.txt src/

# Parallel jobs
./bkp -j 4 -c 8 data/*.csv project/

# Shell globs (or let bkp expand patterns)
./bkp 'logs/*.log'

# Extract
./bkp -x project.20260714120000.tgz restored/

# Compatible with system tar
tar -tzf project.20260714120000.tgz
tar -xzf project.20260714120000.tgz -C restored/

Hardlinks share an inode: the first copy stores data; later names reference it. Symlinks store the link target, not the pointed-to content.

Extract rejects path traversal (.., absolute names) before writing under the destination.

make test

Covers file copy, nested tree, symlink, hardlink, tar -tzf, and bkp -x.

Publishing a GitHub Release runs .github/workflows/release.yml and attaches:

bkp is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

Bundled miniz retains its own license (see vendor/MINIZ_LICENSE).