Backup Buddies
Getting started
Everything you need to go from nothing to two machines actually backing each other up, in order. Each step links to where you'll do it.
1. Create your account
Sign up with an email and password, or with Google — either way you'll need to accept the Terms of Service, which spells out that data stored with a buddy is at your own risk (see Terms for the full picture of what that means and what doesn't change).
2. Find a buddy
You need someone to trade storage with before anything else here is useful. From your dashboard, you have two options:
- Invite someone you know — pick how much storage to pledge, generate a code under Invite a buddy, and send it to them directly.
- Find someone publicly — check "List this publicly" when creating your invite to list it in Find a buddy, or browse that same list to request a pairing with someone who's already listed space.
Either way, a pairing becomes active the moment the other side redeems it — no approval step beyond that.
3. Check your billing
The first 50GB you pledge (combined across all your pairings) is free. Past that, it's $3/TB/month, billed automatically based on how much you've pledged — not how much you've actually used. Check your estimated cost and subscribe (if needed) under Billing. If you're staying under 50GB, you can skip this — nothing to subscribe to yet.
4. Set up the client on your machine(s)
This is the part that actually moves data. Once you have an active pairing:
- Add a device under Devices on your dashboard — this gives you a token.
- Follow the full walkthrough on the Client setup page to install and run it with that token.
- Do this on every machine you want backed up. Your buddy needs to do the same on theirs — both sides have to be running the client for anything to happen.
BACKUP_PASSPHRASE is the only key to your backups — files are encrypted with it on your
own machine, and nobody else ever has it. If you lose it, what your buddy holds for you can never be
decrypted: not by a password reset (that's only your website login), not by support, not by us.
It's not stored anywhere but your .env file, which won't help if the machine itself dies.
5. Confirm it's working
Once both clients are running, your dashboard's Devices card will show each device as connected, and the client's own logs will show a cycle line roughly every 30 seconds — "backup cycle complete" if there's something to send, or "nothing new to back up" if not (which is what you'll see on a device that's only receiving, every cycle — that still confirms the connection). If you pointed this device at a folder to back up, your buddy actually ends up holding an encrypted, restorable copy of your files — not just a connection test. See the Client setup page's troubleshooting section if that's not happening.
What the client actually does
This is a real backup client, not a demo: it watches your folder, encrypts and sends new or changed files automatically, mirrors deletions, and lets you restore everything — or a specific earlier version of a file you've since overwritten — from its local dashboard or the restore command. See the Client setup page's "What this version actually does" section for the full rundown, including its current limits.