// the take
A single bash script that backs up and restores Docker volumes, either as gzip tarballs (export/import) or as busybox images holding the volume's files (save/load) so you can push/pull via a normal image registry. It's aimed at anyone running Docker without Desktop who needs a quick, dependency-free way to move volume data around.
The two mechanisms cover different needs well: tarballs for local backup/restore, images for shipping volume data through a registry you already have access control and retention policies for. It's genuinely dependency-light — just the Docker CLI, no agent or daemon to install. There's a real Bats test suite (round-trip integrity, special characters, cross-platform) and CI/lint workflows, which is more rigor than most single-script tools bother with. The VACKUP_FAILURE_SCRIPT hook is a nice touch for wiring failures into existing alerting without modifying the script itself.
The README opens by saying Docker Desktop's built-in Volumes tab now does this with more features and that the author is just keeping the tool around — that's the maintainer himself signaling this is a legacy fallback, not an actively advancing project. There's no incremental or differential backup; every run is a full copy, so it won't scale to large volumes or frequent backup schedules. It explicitly doesn't handle open files like live databases — you have to stop the container or use the database's own backup tool first, which the README admits but doesn't help with. No encryption and no locking against concurrent access to the same volume, so it's on you to avoid corrupt backups from a volume being written to mid-export.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →