Why dotbak?

I kept switching between machines — work laptop, personal desktop, a random server — and every time I'd lose my shell config, my vim setup, my git aliases. The stuff that makes a machine mine.

I looked at what's out there. GNU Stow is clever but thinks in terms of symlink farms and package directories — I just want to point at ~/.zshrc and say "back this up." Chezmoi is powerful but it's a whole templating engine with state files and source directories. Yadm tries to turn your entire home directory into a git repo. Dotbot needs you to write YAML configs before it does anything.

Every tool I tried made me learn their mental model before I could do the one thing I actually wanted: keep my dotfiles safe and get them onto a new machine.

So I built dotbak. You run dotbak add ~/.zshrc, pick snapshot or symlink mode, and you're done. No templates, no YAML, no git knowledge required. One command to back up, one command to restore. It stays out of your way until you need it.

It's a bash script. It runs everywhere bash runs. It doesn't need Python, Ruby, Go, or a package manager.

That's it. Simple dotfiles manager that just works.

dotbak — Simple Dotfiles Manager

A minimal, user-friendly dotfiles backup manager

A minimal, user-friendly dotfiles backup manager