The Verdict
GUI backup tools
A fter assessing the results of this month’s Roundup, it’s our opinion that Vorta offers the best balance of sophisticated features that are accessed through a pleasant user interface. It’s also reassuring that it sits on a wellmaintained backup tool called BorgBackup. This means that every time BorgBackup gains a new feature or has a bug ironed out, Vorta also gains that improvement too. Additionally, if Vorta were ever to be abandoned then you’d still be able to access old backups, thanks to BorgBackup.
The Vorta user interface is neat in appearance and efficient in use. We reckon that most users could be up and running with it fairly quickly. We liked the option of mounting the backup snapshots within the Linux filesystem so that you can use a standard browser and other Linux tools to access the contents. The facilities of Vorta worked as expected in our tests. We backed up an entire system to a network shared drive and it took just over an hour. The following day, it took four and a half minutes to do an incremental backup with 1.7GB of extra data. Diffing the snapshots showed that the bulk of that extra space came from virtual machine snapshots that we had created.