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Create flexible backups with Kopia

Weathering the Storm

Article from ADMIN 88/2025

By Tam Hanna

The Kopia open source system for automating the creation and transfer of backups supports a wide range of remote storage devices, making it particularly useful as a backup tool in cloud environments. The convenient GUI for Windows installations holds its own against commercial products, despite its short development history.

Providers of cloud-based security systems often implement procedures on the server side to tighten vendor lock-in and prevent canceled subscriptions. Kopia [1] avoids this problem by implementing the backup system's intelligence on the client side (Figure 1). Before I look at this structure in detail, let me just mention that Kopia uses a rolling hash in the background (i.e., a hash function that processes files sector by sector [3]).

Figure 1: Kopia architecture (source: Kopia [2]).

Layers Manage Storage

The lowest hierarchical element in the Kopia architecture is blob storage, which is responsible for storing the raw data. Kopia currently supports a dozen or more different implementations [4]. One level above is the storage manager, also known as content-addressable block storage, which generates the hash functions mentioned earlier and is responsible for modularizing and encrypting the data records managed by Kopia.

Because this level is primarily optimized for managing blocks of around 20MB, another level, known as content-addressable object storage, in combination with metadata management, lets you store more or

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