About Onesimus

One developer, a community vision, and why the name comes from an ancient letter.

Who’s Behind This?

Right now, Onesimus is a one-person project. I write the code, design the UI, maintain the build system, and answer the issues. There’s no company behind it, no funding, no team.

How It Started

I needed backups for a small software company. Bareos was the right choice — powerful, flexible, open source. But setting it up through the console overwhelmed me. What’s a pool? Which retention fits? Which schedule entry belongs to which job? The documentation assumes knowledge that beginners simply don’t have.

Eventually, everything was running. But along the way I made bad decisions — wrong retention periods, volumes that were too small, pools without a clear structure. Mistakes that only became visible weeks later, when storage filled up or a restore didn’t deliver the expected data.

And once it was running, the tools for ongoing maintenance were missing. Which volumes have expired? How much storage does each client consume? When will the pool fill up? The answers were buried in SQL queries and bash scripts you had to cobble together yourself — or in bconsole commands whose output you first had to learn to interpret. For a full-time backup admin, that may be manageable. For someone running backups on the side, it’s too complicated.

That experience is the real reason Onesimus exists. Not frustration with bconsole as a tool — bconsole works. But the realization that a visual interface makes connections visible that remain hidden in the console. When you see a schedule as a Gantt chart, you spot collisions immediately. When you have pools and volumes as an overview, misconfigurations stand out before they cause damage. And when maintenance tasks are a click instead of a script, they actually get done.

Onesimus takes what I learned the hard way and puts it into an interface that makes getting started intuitive for beginners — and daily work easier for experienced admins.

Built for a Community

But I didn’t build it for myself alone. From day one, Onesimus was designed for a community:

• Open source under the MIT license — no restrictions, no strings attached
• Multi-language from the start — because backup admins aren’t all English speakers
• Cross-platform — because your tools should run where you work
• Modular architecture — because a community project needs to be readable and extensible

If you want to contribute — code, translations, documentation, bug reports, ideas — you’re welcome. This project grows with the people who use it.

A Note on Worldview

You’ll notice that Onesimus carries a name from the New Testament, a logo with an orthodox cross, and a tagline that references heaven. That’s not accidental — it reflects my personal faith, and it’s the honest answer to “why this name?”

But let me be equally clear about something else:

I respect every person, regardless of their worldview, faith, philosophy, or background. You don’t have to share my beliefs to use this software, contribute to it, or be part of this community. I won’t ask, and it doesn’t matter.

Respect doesn’t mean agreement. I won’t pretend to share convictions I don’t hold, and I don’t expect you to share mine. What I do expect — from myself and from everyone involved — is basic human decency: treat people with dignity, argue ideas on their merits, and leave room for honest disagreement.

That’s the deal. The code is MIT-licensed, the community is open, and the door is wide.

Why “Onesimus”?

The name Onesimus (Greek: Ὀνήσιμος — “the useful one”) comes from a story in the New Testament that, as it turns out, has everything to do with backup and recovery.

Onesimus was a slave who ran away from his master Philemon — taking valuable property with him. Lost, far from home, seemingly beyond recovery. In Rome he encountered the Apostle Paul, who transformed his life. Paul sent him back — not as a slave, but as a brother. What was lost was restored. What was useless became useful. What seemed gone forever came home.

Sound familiar?

The Backup Metaphor

Every backup administrator knows the feeling: data that seemed lost, files that went missing, systems that failed. The moment of restore — when what was gone comes back intact — is nothing short of a small resurrection.

I named this project Onesimus because I believe in that principle at every level:

What is entrusted will be preserved. What is preserved will be restored.

Replace “moths and vermin” with disk failures and ransomware, and you have a pretty good description of why backups matter.

The Key and the Cross

The Onesimus logo tells the whole story in a single image:

• The key ring forms the letter O — the beginning of Ὀνήσιμος
• The orthodox cross inside the ring points to the faith that inspired the name
• The key shaft and teeth represent TLS encryption, security, and the authority to access and restore what has been stored
• The Greek subtitle — Ὀνήσιμος, the useful one — ties it back to the biblical Onesimus, once useless, now indispensable

Open Source, Open Door

Onesimus is free and open source under the MIT license. Not because I don’t value the work, but because I believe that tools for protecting people’s data should be accessible to everyone.

Onesimus went from slave to free man to bishop. This project goes from one developer’s idea to (hopefully) a community effort. It starts here — open, free, and useful.

You and your data — you both deserve to come home. Onesimus brings you back.

Support the Project

Onesimus is built by one developer in spare time — no company, no funding. If it saves you hours of bconsole work or makes your backup life easier, consider supporting the project:

PayPal: Joerg.Bernau@web.de

Every contribution helps keep development going — and shows that open source backup tooling matters.