Design Goals

V’Ger synthesizes the best ideas from a decade of backup tool development into a single Rust binary. These are the principles behind its design.

One tool, not an assembly

Configuration, scheduling, monitoring, hooks, and health checks belong in the backup tool itself — not in a constellation of wrappers and scripts bolted on after the fact.

Config-first

Your entire backup strategy lives in a single YAML file that can be version-controlled, reviewed, and deployed across machines. A repository path and a list of sources is enough to get going.

repository: /backups/myrepo
sources:
  - /home/user/documents
  - /home/user/photos

Universal primitives over specific integrations

V’Ger doesn’t have dedicated flags for specific databases or services. Instead, hooks and command dumps let you capture the output of any command — the same mechanism works for every database, container, or workflow.

sources:
  - path: /var/backups/db
    label: databases
    hooks:
      before: "pg_dump -Fc mydb > /var/backups/db/mydb.dump"
      after:  "rm -f /var/backups/db/mydb.dump"

Labels, not naming schemes

Snapshots get auto-generated IDs. Labels like personal or databases represent what you’re backing up and group snapshots for retention, filtering, and restore — without requiring unique names or opaque hashes.

vger list -S databases --last 5
vger restore --source personal latest

Encryption by default

Encryption is always on. V’Ger auto-selects AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 based on hardware support. Chunk IDs use keyed hashing to prevent content fingerprinting against the repository.

The repository is untrusted

All data is encrypted and authenticated before it leaves the client. The optional REST server enforces append-only access and quotas, so even a compromised client cannot delete historical backups.

Browse without dependencies

vger mount starts a built-in WebDAV server and web interface. Browse and restore snapshots from any browser or file manager — on any platform, in containers, with zero external dependencies.

Performance through Rust

No GIL bottleneck, no garbage collection pauses, predictable memory usage. FastCDC chunking, parallel compression, and streaming uploads keep the pipeline saturated. Built-in rate limiting for CPU, disk I/O, and network lets V’Ger run during business hours.

Discoverability in the CLI

Common operations are short top-level commands. Everything targeting a specific snapshot lives under vger snapshot. Flags are consistent everywhere: -R is always a repository, -S is always a source label.

vger backup
vger list
vger snapshot find -name "*.xlsx"
vger snapshot diff a3f7c2 b8d4e1

No lock-in

The repository format is documented, the source is open under GPL-3.0 license, and the REST server is optional. The config is plain YAML with no proprietary syntax.