NGBackup on Dicas-L: an endorsement from almost three decades of free software in Brazil

On July 28, 2026, Dicas-L published a review of NGBackup — "NGBackup: a new Brazilian data-protection platform written in Rust". For anyone who grew up professionally in the Brazilian Linux world, this is not just another article. Dicas-L is very likely the longest-running and most respected free-software publication in the country — and earning its attention is an endorsement no marketing campaign can buy.

What Dicas-L is — and why it matters

Dicas-L was born on March 3, 1997, at the Computing Center of Unicamp (University of Campinas), created by Rubens Queiroz de Almeida. The formula was simple and, for its time, revolutionary: an e-mail discussion list delivering a tip of the day about Unix, GNU/Linux and systems administration — every day, for free, in Portuguese.

In a pre-Google, pre-Stack Overflow era, when Portuguese-language documentation was nearly nonexistent, Dicas-L became the informal school of entire generations of Brazilian system administrators. The list grew past 21,000 subscribers, and its public archive holds thousands of tips, articles and tutorials still online today — almost three decades of open, continuous, free knowledge.

Rubens Queiroz de Almeida: the quiet evangelist

Rubens is one of the founding figures of the free-software community in Brazil. An analyst at Unicamp's Computing Center, he turned knowledge-sharing into a life project: beyond Dicas-L, he created Rau-Tu, Unicamp's collaborative Q&A system that anticipated by years the model the world would later know; in 2000 he published the book "Linux: Dicas e Truques" (Conectiva), compiling the list's first three years — a work he later released as a free download; and he kept writing, translating and spreading the free-software philosophy for decades, building a loyal community that still follows him through the site, RSS and Telegram.

When someone with that track record devotes a review to a new project, the community pays attention. That is the weight of the endorsement.

What Dicas-L said about NGBackup

The review walks through the whole platform with the sober, technical eye the publication is known for:

• Rust, not legacy C — the article highlights that NGBackup is new code written in Rust, eliminating by construction whole classes of memory vulnerabilities (buffer overflows, use-after-free) common in backup software carrying decades of accumulated code.
• Distributed architecture — a central Director orchestrating policies, agents on protected machines, storage services and a PostgreSQL catalog, with configuration-as-data (no manual file editing).
• Broad coverage — GNU/Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD and Solaris; plugins for Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox and Microsoft 365.
• The technical differentiators — global deduplication across clients and jobs, WORM immutable storage against ransomware, AES-256-GCM encryption, Instant Recovery of VMs straight from backup, V2V conversion between hypervisors, and Director high availability with quorum.
• Data sovereignty — the freedom to choose where data lives: local disk, NFS, S3, tape or VTL, under the jurisdiction of whoever operates it.
• Free Community edition — noted as the no-cost gateway to explore the platform.

And, like any good technical review, it is no pamphlet: it reminds readers that a new platform "still needs to prove stability in large-scale testing and documented real-world recoveries" — and even so concludes that NGBackup "deserves attention as an ambitious Brazilian initiative in a segment traditionally dominated by foreign vendors". That is exactly the kind of honest assessment we want.

Two Brazilian stories meeting

There is a beautiful symmetry here. Dicas-L spent 29 years proving that Brazil produces and shares first-rate technical knowledge in free software. NGBackup — unveiled on July 4, 2026 by NGStructures, built on more than two decades of enterprise data-protection experience — wants to prove Brazil also builds world-class critical infrastructure. The Dicas-L coverage connects those two ends: the community that trained the professionals, and the platform that now protects the data they run.

To Rubens and the Dicas-L community: thank you for the rigorous review and the endorsement. It honors us — and holds us accountable. We will keep delivering.

Read, explore, test

Read the full article on Dicas-L (in Portuguese) — and browse the portal's archive, still publishing daily.

Download NGBackup Community free — up to 10 TB and 10 backup objects, no cost, no time limit, with the full engine described in the review. Or book a POC for your environment.

Sources: Dicas-L (dicas-l.com.br, article of 2026-07-28, by Rubens Queiroz de Almeida); Jornal da Unicamp (June 2003, on the 21,000-subscriber list and Rau-Tu); BR-Linux (Dicas-L's 18th anniversary, 2015-03-03); "Linux: Dicas e Truques" (Conectiva, 2000).