3 ms·

"Once version 1.0.0 is released, we guarantee backward compatibility of all repositories within one major version; as long as we do not increment the major vers

"Once version 1.0.0 is released, we guarantee backward compatibility of all repositories within one major version; as long as we do not increment the major version, data can be read and restored. We strive to be fully backward compatible to all prior versions. During initial development (versions prior to 1.0.0), maintainers and developers will do their utmost to keep backwards compatibility and stability, although there might be breaking changes without increasing the major version. " they are on 0.12 now

lucb1e 5y ago
For what it's worth, it has a good track record, but yes you're totally right that restic is not exactly commercial-grade software with proper guarantees. In one of the early talks at a local hackerspace, the author did also demo decrypting the data manually if something got somehow broken. The tool is just a layer on top of relatively straightforward cryptography. From what I remember (I looked at this in 2018 so forgive any errors), you'd have to write a script that iterates over the index where it says which blocks are in which files (since it's deduplicated) and decrypt it with some standard AES library. Perhaps as a security consultant this seems easier to me than it does to others, though, but it's not as if you're without hope if the tool did break, or as if you couldn't just download a previous version from the GitHub releases page.
41b696ef1113 5y ago
One of the reasons I prefer restic to borg is it is trivial to maintain a standalone copy of the executable. Wherever I put backups, I keep a copy of the restic executable used to generate the dump. For extra paranoid, could clone the restic source tree (with vendored dependencies). Go language backwards compatibility is such that I should always be able to read my data.

3 ms·

"Once version 1.0.0 is released, we guarantee backward compatibility of all repositories within one major version; as long as we do not increment the major vers

by mushufasa 5y ago

lucb1e 5y ago
For what it's worth, it has a good track record, but yes you're totally right that restic is not exactly commercial-grade software with proper guarantees. In one of the early talks at a local hackerspace, the author did also demo decrypting the data manually if something got somehow broken. The tool is just a layer on top of relatively straightforward cryptography. From what I remember (I looked at this in 2018 so forgive any errors), you'd have to write a script that iterates over the index where it says which blocks are in which files (since it's deduplicated) and decrypt it with some standard AES library. Perhaps as a security consultant this seems easier to me than it does to others, though, but it's not as if you're without hope if the tool did break, or as if you couldn't just download a previous version from the GitHub releases page.
41b696ef1113 5y ago
One of the reasons I prefer restic to borg is it is trivial to maintain a standalone copy of the executable. Wherever I put backups, I keep a copy of the restic executable used to generate the dump. For extra paranoid, could clone the restic source tree (with vendored dependencies). Go language backwards compatibility is such that I should always be able to read my data.