Mirror Backup on ZimaOS

Insight & Feedback
1

I’ve been backing up my ZimaCube but I have noticed that the backup destination has all the files that I had removed from the source, it would be great to have a Mirror feature on the Backup App so everything looks like the source.

but thankfully I was able to recover from disaster thanks to the backup app, but I had to manually re arrange all things :confused: .

1 Like
2

+1 to that.

I know it sounds like just copy from one location to another but now Backup creates History folder with sub folders for each file and so on. This gives a lot of manual work in case of restore when restore can’t be done from the same backup setup.

Regard
Tom

3

You’re both right, current ZimaOS Backup is versioned, not mirrored.
That’s why deleted source files remain in the destination inside History/.

If you want the destination to always look exactly like the source, you need a true mirror (sync with delete), not versioned backup.

Right now the Backup App is designed for:

  • Disaster recovery
  • File history / rollback
  • Protection against accidental deletion

It is not designed for:

  • 1:1 live mirror
  • Clean destination identical to source

Practical Workaround (Until Mirror Option Exists)

Use rsync with delete enabled.

Example:

rsync -av --delete /DATA/source/ /DATA/destination/

What this does:

  • Copies new/changed files
  • Removes files from destination that no longer exist in source
  • Keeps folder structure identical

You can schedule this with cron or Ofelia.

Suggestion to Devs

It would be very useful to have a selectable “Mirror Mode” in the Backup App.
Current versioning is excellent for recovery, but some users need a clean 1:1 sync where deleted source files are also removed from the destination.
An optional “Mirror (Sync with Delete)” mode would solve this without removing versioned backup functionality.

Important distinction:

Backup = versioned safety
Mirror = exact sync

Both are valid. They just serve different goals.

1 Like