XReplicator – eBPF-based server backups that track only changed disk sectors

4 points

2 months ago

I've been in cloud/platform engineering for a decade. One thing that always frustrated me: every backup tool either relies on fragile kernel modules for change block tracking, or does full-disk scans even when 1% of data changed. So we built XReplicator. It uses eBPF tracepoints to track dirty sectors at the block device layer — no kernel modules, no hypervisor APIs, no cloud-specific hooks. The agent runs inside the VM and works on any platform. Kernel devs called me mad for using eBPF for disk data replication. But the numbers speak for themselves:

Full backup: ~17 minutes Incremental after 1.4% change: ~2 minutes Incremental after 0.4% change: ~56 seconds 71x less data scanned vs full backup 65–72% storage savings (LZ4 + block-level dedup)

No kernel module compilation per kernel version, no reboots, sandboxed execution via the eBPF verifier. Restore at file, partition, or full disk level from any point in the chain. Honest caveat: the eBPF path only works on Linux kernel 5.10+. For legacy Linux and Windows we fall back to full-disk scan based incrementals — slower, but it works. XReplicator grew out of XMigrate, our open source project for making VM workloads portable across clouds. The product is closed source but there's a free community version. https://xmigrate.cloud https://github.com/xmigrate/xreplicator/releases Happy to go deep on the eBPF implementation - ask away.

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