8 ms·

Restic: Backups done right

231 points by fanf2 2y ago

andarp 2y ago
I have used restic for a year now. I’ve thought about it twice. 9/10 would backup again.
- stavros 2y ago
  I've used restic for five years (and also Borg is equally good), similarly very much recommended: https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
tguvot 2y ago
https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups like in duplicity
- kam 2y ago
  What do you miss about it? In restic, every snapshot has the speed and size of an incremental backup, but the functionality of a full backup.
  - tguvot 2y ago
    sometimes you just must have a new full backup every N days/weeks. it a more "smooth" way to deal with potential corruption in repo that might be undetected (without dealing with all suggested workarounds) and in some cases compliance/certification requires it
- Jnr 2y ago
  Backrest is great. It makes it very easy to configure restic backups and do the restores.
yapyap 2y ago
Awesome, I’m using BackInTime right now for ’snapshot’-like backups but I’m always interested in new solutions
alibert 2y ago
Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it compare to: - Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs https://rustic.cli.rs - Kopia https://kopia.io https://kopia.io
- Scandiravian 2y ago
  I switched to rustic a couple of months ago due to it being able to filter based on .gitignore files. Have done a few test restores and everything has worked well so far
- tinodb 2y ago
  From the rustic readme: > rustic currently is in beta state and misses regression tests. It is not recommended to use it for production backups, yet.
- asteroidburger 2y ago
  Rustic is a rewrite of Restic from Go to Rust. See https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
  - rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
    It looks nice, but until they support FUSE mounting, I'll stick with restic.
- aliasxneo 2y ago
  I perused the Rustic website and they have a direct comparison of Restic here: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm. At face value I thought it was just, "because it's Rust," but it does appear to have a few additional features. I haven't used either, though.
  - dicytea 2y ago
    You dropped the l: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
Jur 2y ago
Interesting, I'll give this a try. I'm hoping one day to retire my subscription/cloud-based back-ups with something docker based that still back-ups to multiple instances (local and remote).
gmuslera 2y ago
I’m more fan of BorgBackup, but you have to couple it with I.e. rclone for it to make backups to cloud object storage. But that opinion is based on my particular use case, probably would be using restic if direct to cloud was a better choice.
- pdw 2y ago
  Borg 2.0 supposedly will support cloud backups out of the box.
kayson 2y ago
Other popular choices include borg, duplicity, and duplicati. After evaluating these and others mentioned in the comments, I ended up using borg with borgmatic to define homelab backups with yaml files that are version controlled in gitea and deployed using ansible. I also use duplicity to back up my sister in laws storefront website to backblaze. I've been quite happy with both. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ http://duplicity.gitlab.io/ http://duplicity.gitlab.io/ https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/ https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/
- mikae1 2y ago
  BorgBackup is also my choice. More features, but that's not necessarily a good (or bad) thing if Restic does everything you need.
- riedel 2y ago
  I'd throw in kopia[0], fast, many features and easy to use across platforms. [0] https://kopia.io/ https://kopia.io/
  - mongol 2y ago
    I have seen Kopia mentioned from time to time but never as often as borg. Does it have a good reputation?
    - bityard 2y ago
      I've been using it for years with zero problems.
    - TiredOfLife 2y ago
      It's not as old, but has a Gui and is native on Linux/Windows/Macos.
  - crossroadsguy 2y ago
    Last time I tried Kopia was more like "select ONE folder to backup and add ONE destination to SNAPSHOT it to". While it is very simplistic and would be lovely in many use cases - for a home/personal backup which often requires granularity of inclusion and exclusion it just didn't make any sense. I am not sure whether that has changed.
evanjrowley 2y ago
There is also autorestic - A simplified YAML-based configuration for dealing with Restic backups: https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic
- justusthane 2y ago
  I hadn’t seen autorestic before so I can’t compare them, but there’s resticprofile
dmw_ng 2y ago
I'm a restic user, but have resisted the urge to attempt a bikeshed for a long time, mostly due to perf. It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC). Drives me nuts to watch it chugging along backing up or listing snapshots at nowhere close to the IO rate of the system while still making the fans run. Despite that it still seems to be the best free software option around
- evulhotdog 2y ago
  You should check out Kopia. It’s absolutely wonderful, is fast, has similar features, and has a GUI if you’re into that.
  - eternityforest 2y ago
    Currently using Kopia because Restic has no GUI and Borg requires adding a community maintained Synology package, and it didn't "Just work" when I tried. It's amazing! The GUI isn't perfect but the fact that there is an official GUI at all is great.
  - dizhn 2y ago
    I don't need a GUI but an official config format or a manager tool for restic would be cool. There ARE a few good 3rd party ones of course.
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
  Have you opened issues with suggested algo improvements? They might be open to them. Even if restic isn't interested, maybe the rustic dev will be.
- Svenstaro 2y ago
  You could try running rustic on your repository. It should be a drop-in for restic and maybe it's faster? I would actually be very interested in this. Would be great if you could do that and report back.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
SomeoneOnTheWeb 2y ago
I've tried many options and ended up distching Restic for Borg and then Borg for Kopia, which was IMO the best option.
slig 2y ago
What's the best way to backup a managed Postgres from DO to another cloud?
- fmajid 2y ago
  Not sure what DO managed PostgreSQL supports, but PostgreSQL streaming replication would seem like the natural way to go.
  - slig 2y ago
    They don't support that, forgot to clarify that in my comment. Thanks!
    - fmajid 2y ago
      And this is exactly why you do not want to use managed services with all sorts of restrictions that by the unlikeliest of coincidences also lock you in like a roach motel /s
chrchr 2y ago
My Thinkpad has a tiny SDHC slot. I put a 1 terabyte SDHC card in it (~$80) and have a cron job take hourly Restic snapshots of my primary storage. It's been reliable and has bailed me out more than once.
- immibis 2y ago
  Make sure to verify it against bitrot. SD cards aren't the most reliable media.
thekashifmalik 2y ago
Big fan of restic! The only feature I found missing was the ability to browse historical snapshots like regular files. I wrote and now use the rsync-based, browsable, incremental backup CLI: https://rincr.com/ https://rincr.com/
- heinrichf 2y ago
  Restic has a mount subcommand that exposes all backups through a FUSE filesystem, no?
- demomode 2y ago
  Isn't that the purpose of `restic mount`?
- dmd 2y ago
  What do you mean by that? "restic mount" has been part of restic since the very start.
  - thekashifmalik 2y ago
    That command works well and accomplishes some of what rincr what built to solve. For example, when I mention browse-ability, I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers. I also needed both "pull" (backup remote files) and "push" (backup local files) backup features and if I'm not mistaken restic still only supports the "push" model. EDIT: Added more details
    - homebrewer 2y ago
      If you're doing pull to prevent remotes from destroying old backups (in case of malware takeover, etc), this can be solved by running rest-server with --append-only https://github.com/restic/rest-server https://github.com/restic/rest-server It 403's any attempt to overwrite or delete old data.
    - luoc 2y ago
      Browsing without dependencies is a bit tricky due to a) deduplication, b) encryption and c) compression of restic's backups.
dang 2y ago
Related: Restic 0.17.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 - July 2024 (5 comments) Restic – Simple Backups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 - Jan 2024 (14 comments) Restic 0.15.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364925 - Jan 2023 (1 comment) Restic 0.14.0 Released (with highly anticipated feature – compression) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599032 - Aug 2022 (5 comments) Restic 0.13.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 - March 2022 (66 comments) Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209455 - Nov 2021 (286 comments) Saving a restic backup the hard way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438430 - Sept 2021 (2 comments) Restic Cryptography (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 - June 2021 (5 comments) Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410833 - Oct 2019 (177 comments) Show HN: K8up – Kubernetes Backup Operator Based on Restic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769362 - Aug 2019 (18 comments) Append-only backups with restic and rclone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 - March 2019 (42 comments) Restic Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 - Aug 2017 (36 comments) Restic – Backups done right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 - Aug 2015 (1 comment)
aborsy 2y ago
Restic is great! It has worked flawlessly for me for several years. Anyone knows if there is plan to add Reed Solomon erasure coding, just in case there will be errors in repository? Something like Par2. Asymmetric encryption could also be useful in some situations. Perhaps they could just use Age for the asymmetric encryption backend (unfortunately Age offers only 128 bits of security in its symmetric encryption, so it’s not recommended for long term storage, because of the save-now decrypt-later attack). But I expect a stable quantum resistant plug-in appearing next year or so.
- seqizz 2y ago
  Afaik not yet, there was some discussion here: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804
npace12 2y ago
first time I heard of this was yesterday, in a thecatch2024 CTF. Today, on HN... https://www.thecatch.cz/ https://www.thecatch.cz/
cvalka 2y ago
Rustic is better
notherhack 2y ago
Restic 0.17.1 was released last month. The home page says "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." So worth a peek but still under construction.
NelsonMinar 2y ago
Try BackRest if you want a nice frontend to Restic. You can configure Restic from the command line but it's pretty awkward. BackRest has a nice simple web GUI and makes basic automation very easy. https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest I'm surprised no one is selling Restic hosting as a straight up service. BackBlaze works well with Restic but the configuration is a little manual and clumsy. A packaged solution would be a nice thing. Restic is very very good. My only nervousness is the backup format is so opaque, you need a working copy of Restic to restore from it. The format is documented though and of course the code is open source, so I think it's probably fine in practice.
- confusedalex 2y ago
  Despite the name Borgbase [0] offers Restic hosting, with actual documentation on how to set it up. Hetzner [1] also offers Restic [0] https://www.borgbase.com/ https://www.borgbase.com/ [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
  - josephb 2y ago
    Restic user and also a long time user of Borgbase, their offering is pretty neat!
  - crossroadsguy 2y ago
    Huh. Interesting. Didn't know borgbase supports restic as well. I already have a plan there for vorta/borg. Thanks.
lossolo 2y ago
Pruning takes forever in Restic, which is why we migrated away from it.
- Sakos 2y ago
  What did you migrate to?
manuel_w 2y ago
Which one is more resistant to bitrot, Restic or Borg Backup? (Yes, bitrot might better be mitigated at the filesystem layer, but I'm not switching to ZFS, btrfs or bcache-fs anytime soon.)
- rodgerd 2y ago
  One thing that I like about Restic is that you can automatically do a test restore of a subset (e.g. 1%, 5%, 8%) of your data, so that you can check for problems on the remote automatically.
- ajvs 2y ago
  Not sure but I know that Vorta (borg GUI) does automatic consistency checking using `borg check ` regularly.
  - crossroadsguy 2y ago
    Vorta offers you "Prune" customisation at the bottom of 'Archives' tab and "check" (validate repo) along with backup settings on 'Schedule' tab.
anotherevan 2y ago
I've been using Restic for servers, but ended up going with Kopia for machines that are not always on, like laptops. It has the advantage that it will take something of an opportunistic approach where it will start backing up if it hasn't done so in a while, and seems to be able to restart with aplomb if it gets interrupted (machine shutdown or laptop lid closed). That and being able to have multiple machines writing to a shared repository at the same time is handy. I have the kids' Windows computers both backing up to the same repo to save a bit of storage. (Now if only Kopia supported VSS on Windows without mucking around with dubious scripts.)
- mariusor 2y ago
  I think the first part could be solved by systemd timers, no?
pixelmonkey 2y ago
Discussion of my approach to using restic + rclone + Backblaze B2 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056
crabique 2y ago
Restic is awesome for moderate operational scale, but when it's got to backup thousands of storage block devices with arbitrary number of files on them, it just doesn't really work. Is there anything cool people use for Ceph-RBD backups nowadays? For now, the only thing in the OSS world that doesn't choke at this scale is Benji, but it looks like it's not really maintained anymore, and I worry it may not support newer Ceph versions.
nh2 2y ago
Faster alternatives I recommend: * Kopia: many features, also great for desktop GUI users * bupstash: The fastest, lowest RAM. I use it to backup 1B files daily (200TB). Ransomware-proof asymmetric multi key crypto. Less features.
- aftbit 2y ago
  bupstash is new to me. That looks like a cool set of properties. I do wish it supported S3 and compatible APIs as a backup target.
  - ajvs 2y ago
    Relevant: Borg 2.x now supports rclone to allow S3-compatible hosts.
ritcgab 2y ago
Duplicity is my go because it integrates so well with pgp signing/encryption. Other popular alternatives like borg and restic just do not have it.
- aftbit 2y ago
  I do wish there were a way to allow a machine to perform backups without also allowing to read them. I generate per-machine secret keys for restic, then encrypt those keys to a set of GPG recipients, and store them alongside the backup data. I did have to roll my own solution for this using s3cmd etc but its not too bad.
- aborsy 2y ago
  This is an important feature. A gpg key can be offline or in Yubikey.
CGamesPlay 2y ago
I built a tool on top of restic to host git repositories on untrusted infrastructure. Its been working fine for my small low traffic projects for years, I only sync the fork every few months. https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic
PeterStuer 2y ago
I wish backup program sites would provide an easy upfront capability statement that includes: - types of backups supported (volume, fileset, ...) - differciality support (incremental, resumable, dedup, ...) - support for (always) open file bakup - filetype/ path restrictions (very large files, max pathlenght, ...) - restore options ( bare metal, selective, backup mountable as volume, ...) This would make it far easier to see if it ia worth checking out
giuseony 2y ago
Since I'm a big user of proxmox and all my systems are debian-based I recently began to use proxmox backup server also for my physical machines! It's quite fast, supports defuplication and I can donwload or mount backup archives. It sadly lacks a good ux, but I'm still evaulating it because pbs is a tool that I'm already using heavily, so I don't mind reducing the amount of individual software needed to carry on my work.
lizknope 2y ago
In the 90's I remember using various backup tools that had their own custom format. I decided that I wanted my backup to be just wanted files on a normal filesystem without being stored in some kind of special format. I realize that this means compression and block level deduplication is harder but those are tradeoffs that I can accept. I've been using rsnapshot (or it's predecessor script) for 20 years now. It's a wrapper around rsync that gives you snapshots that save space by using hard links. I can compare versions with diff. I can restore files with cp -a https://rsnapshot.org/ https://rsnapshot.org/
- wazoox 2y ago
  Yes rsnapshot is fantastic. Plus with some simple configuration you can make your "rsnapshots" appear as legitimate snapshots from your Samba server to Windows clients.
crossroadsguy 2y ago
Seriously try restic with Backrest. I had stopped using restic for almost two years after I got tired of tinkering with my local custom scripts to keep restic setup on my mac running. Then I found Backrest. Oh and it lets you use the snapshop browser right in the UI. That's kinda nice. It's really simple and in active development https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest. The dev (lead dev) https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/discussions https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/discussions is very responsive. I know many comments have said it but I also wanted to add it just because backrest is what made restic usable for me again. Vorta is a favourite backup GUI but somehow I am finding backrest even simpler (although would have loved it if it was a tiny menu bar kinda app). Is there something like Deja Dup on Mac? I am planning to find and add another remote repo now (in addition to b2; and hopefully much cheaper which might be a tough one as b2 is kinda dirt cheap especially for small GBs) so that I can include some more of my less critical files in the additional backup set.
dpbriggs 2y ago
It's on my TODO list to add Restic support to BorgTUI[0]. It supports Rustic but the beta nature and iffy performance leaves something to be desired. [0] https://github.com/dpbriggs/borgtui https://github.com/dpbriggs/borgtui

231 points by fanf2 2y ago

andarp 2y ago

I have used restic for a year now. I’ve thought about it twice. 9/10 would backup again.

stavros 2y ago
I've used restic for five years (and also Borg is equally good), similarly very much recommended: https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

tguvot 2y ago

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups like in duplicity

kam 2y ago
What do you miss about it? In restic, every snapshot has the speed and size of an incremental backup, but the functionality of a full backup.
- tguvot 2y ago
  sometimes you just must have a new full backup every N days/weeks. it a more "smooth" way to deal with potential corruption in repo that might be undetected (without dealing with all suggested workarounds) and in some cases compliance/certification requires it
Jnr 2y ago
Backrest is great. It makes it very easy to configure restic backups and do the restores.

yapyap 2y ago

Awesome, I’m using BackInTime right now for ’snapshot’-like backups but I’m always interested in new solutions

alibert 2y ago

Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it compare to: - Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs https://rustic.cli.rs - Kopia https://kopia.io https://kopia.io

Scandiravian 2y ago
I switched to rustic a couple of months ago due to it being able to filter based on .gitignore files. Have done a few test restores and everything has worked well so far
tinodb 2y ago
From the rustic readme: > rustic currently is in beta state and misses regression tests. It is not recommended to use it for production backups, yet.
asteroidburger 2y ago
Rustic is a rewrite of Restic from Go to Rust. See https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
  It looks nice, but until they support FUSE mounting, I'll stick with restic.
aliasxneo 2y ago
I perused the Rustic website and they have a direct comparison of Restic here: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm. At face value I thought it was just, "because it's Rust," but it does appear to have a few additional features. I haven't used either, though.
- dicytea 2y ago
  You dropped the l: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html

Jur 2y ago

Interesting, I'll give this a try. I'm hoping one day to retire my subscription/cloud-based back-ups with something docker based that still back-ups to multiple instances (local and remote).

gmuslera 2y ago

I’m more fan of BorgBackup, but you have to couple it with I.e. rclone for it to make backups to cloud object storage. But that opinion is based on my particular use case, probably would be using restic if direct to cloud was a better choice.

pdw 2y ago
Borg 2.0 supposedly will support cloud backups out of the box.

kayson 2y ago

Other popular choices include borg, duplicity, and duplicati. After evaluating these and others mentioned in the comments, I ended up using borg with borgmatic to define homelab backups with yaml files that are version controlled in gitea and deployed using ansible. I also use duplicity to back up my sister in laws storefront website to backblaze. I've been quite happy with both. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ http://duplicity.gitlab.io/ http://duplicity.gitlab.io/ https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/ https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/

mikae1 2y ago
BorgBackup is also my choice. More features, but that's not necessarily a good (or bad) thing if Restic does everything you need.
riedel 2y ago
I'd throw in kopia[0], fast, many features and easy to use across platforms. [0] https://kopia.io/ https://kopia.io/
- mongol 2y ago
  I have seen Kopia mentioned from time to time but never as often as borg. Does it have a good reputation?
  - bityard 2y ago
    I've been using it for years with zero problems.
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    It's not as old, but has a Gui and is native on Linux/Windows/Macos.
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  Last time I tried Kopia was more like "select ONE folder to backup and add ONE destination to SNAPSHOT it to". While it is very simplistic and would be lovely in many use cases - for a home/personal backup which often requires granularity of inclusion and exclusion it just didn't make any sense. I am not sure whether that has changed.

evanjrowley 2y ago

There is also autorestic - A simplified YAML-based configuration for dealing with Restic backups: https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic

justusthane 2y ago
I hadn’t seen autorestic before so I can’t compare them, but there’s resticprofile

dmw_ng 2y ago

I'm a restic user, but have resisted the urge to attempt a bikeshed for a long time, mostly due to perf. It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC). Drives me nuts to watch it chugging along backing up or listing snapshots at nowhere close to the IO rate of the system while still making the fans run. Despite that it still seems to be the best free software option around

evulhotdog 2y ago
You should check out Kopia. It’s absolutely wonderful, is fast, has similar features, and has a GUI if you’re into that.
- eternityforest 2y ago
  Currently using Kopia because Restic has no GUI and Borg requires adding a community maintained Synology package, and it didn't "Just work" when I tried. It's amazing! The GUI isn't perfect but the fact that there is an official GUI at all is great.
- dizhn 2y ago
  I don't need a GUI but an official config format or a manager tool for restic would be cool. There ARE a few good 3rd party ones of course.
rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
Have you opened issues with suggested algo improvements? They might be open to them. Even if restic isn't interested, maybe the rustic dev will be.
Svenstaro 2y ago
You could try running rustic on your repository. It should be a drop-in for restic and maybe it's faster? I would actually be very interested in this. Would be great if you could do that and report back.
nextaccountic 2y ago

SomeoneOnTheWeb 2y ago

I've tried many options and ended up distching Restic for Borg and then Borg for Kopia, which was IMO the best option.

slig 2y ago

What's the best way to backup a managed Postgres from DO to another cloud?

fmajid 2y ago
Not sure what DO managed PostgreSQL supports, but PostgreSQL streaming replication would seem like the natural way to go.
- slig 2y ago
  They don't support that, forgot to clarify that in my comment. Thanks!
  - fmajid 2y ago
    And this is exactly why you do not want to use managed services with all sorts of restrictions that by the unlikeliest of coincidences also lock you in like a roach motel /s

chrchr 2y ago

My Thinkpad has a tiny SDHC slot. I put a 1 terabyte SDHC card in it (~$80) and have a cron job take hourly Restic snapshots of my primary storage. It's been reliable and has bailed me out more than once.

immibis 2y ago
Make sure to verify it against bitrot. SD cards aren't the most reliable media.

thekashifmalik 2y ago

Big fan of restic! The only feature I found missing was the ability to browse historical snapshots like regular files. I wrote and now use the rsync-based, browsable, incremental backup CLI: https://rincr.com/ https://rincr.com/

heinrichf 2y ago
Restic has a mount subcommand that exposes all backups through a FUSE filesystem, no?
demomode 2y ago
Isn't that the purpose of `restic mount`?
dmd 2y ago
What do you mean by that? "restic mount" has been part of restic since the very start.
- thekashifmalik 2y ago
  That command works well and accomplishes some of what rincr what built to solve. For example, when I mention browse-ability, I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers. I also needed both "pull" (backup remote files) and "push" (backup local files) backup features and if I'm not mistaken restic still only supports the "push" model. EDIT: Added more details
  - homebrewer 2y ago
    If you're doing pull to prevent remotes from destroying old backups (in case of malware takeover, etc), this can be solved by running rest-server with --append-only https://github.com/restic/rest-server https://github.com/restic/rest-server It 403's any attempt to overwrite or delete old data.
  - luoc 2y ago
    Browsing without dependencies is a bit tricky due to a) deduplication, b) encryption and c) compression of restic's backups.

dang 2y ago

Related: Restic 0.17.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 - July 2024 (5 comments) Restic – Simple Backups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 - Jan 2024 (14 comments) Restic 0.15.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364925 - Jan 2023 (1 comment) Restic 0.14.0 Released (with highly anticipated feature – compression) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599032 - Aug 2022 (5 comments) Restic 0.13.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 - March 2022 (66 comments) Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209455 - Nov 2021 (286 comments) Saving a restic backup the hard way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438430 - Sept 2021 (2 comments) Restic Cryptography (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 - June 2021 (5 comments) Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410833 - Oct 2019 (177 comments) Show HN: K8up – Kubernetes Backup Operator Based on Restic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769362 - Aug 2019 (18 comments) Append-only backups with restic and rclone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 - March 2019 (42 comments) Restic Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 - Aug 2017 (36 comments) Restic – Backups done right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 - Aug 2015 (1 comment)

aborsy 2y ago

Restic is great! It has worked flawlessly for me for several years. Anyone knows if there is plan to add Reed Solomon erasure coding, just in case there will be errors in repository? Something like Par2. Asymmetric encryption could also be useful in some situations. Perhaps they could just use Age for the asymmetric encryption backend (unfortunately Age offers only 128 bits of security in its symmetric encryption, so it’s not recommended for long term storage, because of the save-now decrypt-later attack). But I expect a stable quantum resistant plug-in appearing next year or so.

seqizz 2y ago
Afaik not yet, there was some discussion here: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804

npace12 2y ago

first time I heard of this was yesterday, in a thecatch2024 CTF. Today, on HN... https://www.thecatch.cz/ https://www.thecatch.cz/

cvalka 2y ago

Rustic is better

notherhack 2y ago

Restic 0.17.1 was released last month. The home page says "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." So worth a peek but still under construction.

NelsonMinar 2y ago

Try BackRest if you want a nice frontend to Restic. You can configure Restic from the command line but it's pretty awkward. BackRest has a nice simple web GUI and makes basic automation very easy. https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest I'm surprised no one is selling Restic hosting as a straight up service. BackBlaze works well with Restic but the configuration is a little manual and clumsy. A packaged solution would be a nice thing. Restic is very very good. My only nervousness is the backup format is so opaque, you need a working copy of Restic to restore from it. The format is documented though and of course the code is open source, so I think it's probably fine in practice.

confusedalex 2y ago
Despite the name Borgbase [0] offers Restic hosting, with actual documentation on how to set it up. Hetzner [1] also offers Restic [0] https://www.borgbase.com/ https://www.borgbase.com/ [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
- josephb 2y ago
  Restic user and also a long time user of Borgbase, their offering is pretty neat!
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  Huh. Interesting. Didn't know borgbase supports restic as well. I already have a plan there for vorta/borg. Thanks.

lossolo 2y ago

Pruning takes forever in Restic, which is why we migrated away from it.

Sakos 2y ago
What did you migrate to?

manuel_w 2y ago

Which one is more resistant to bitrot, Restic or Borg Backup? (Yes, bitrot might better be mitigated at the filesystem layer, but I'm not switching to ZFS, btrfs or bcache-fs anytime soon.)

rodgerd 2y ago
One thing that I like about Restic is that you can automatically do a test restore of a subset (e.g. 1%, 5%, 8%) of your data, so that you can check for problems on the remote automatically.
ajvs 2y ago
Not sure but I know that Vorta (borg GUI) does automatic consistency checking using `borg check ` regularly.
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  Vorta offers you "Prune" customisation at the bottom of 'Archives' tab and "check" (validate repo) along with backup settings on 'Schedule' tab.

anotherevan 2y ago

I've been using Restic for servers, but ended up going with Kopia for machines that are not always on, like laptops. It has the advantage that it will take something of an opportunistic approach where it will start backing up if it hasn't done so in a while, and seems to be able to restart with aplomb if it gets interrupted (machine shutdown or laptop lid closed). That and being able to have multiple machines writing to a shared repository at the same time is handy. I have the kids' Windows computers both backing up to the same repo to save a bit of storage. (Now if only Kopia supported VSS on Windows without mucking around with dubious scripts.)

mariusor 2y ago
I think the first part could be solved by systemd timers, no?

pixelmonkey 2y ago

Discussion of my approach to using restic + rclone + Backblaze B2 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056

crabique 2y ago

Restic is awesome for moderate operational scale, but when it's got to backup thousands of storage block devices with arbitrary number of files on them, it just doesn't really work. Is there anything cool people use for Ceph-RBD backups nowadays? For now, the only thing in the OSS world that doesn't choke at this scale is Benji, but it looks like it's not really maintained anymore, and I worry it may not support newer Ceph versions.

nh2 2y ago

Faster alternatives I recommend: * Kopia: many features, also great for desktop GUI users * bupstash: The fastest, lowest RAM. I use it to backup 1B files daily (200TB). Ransomware-proof asymmetric multi key crypto. Less features.

aftbit 2y ago
bupstash is new to me. That looks like a cool set of properties. I do wish it supported S3 and compatible APIs as a backup target.
- ajvs 2y ago
  Relevant: Borg 2.x now supports rclone to allow S3-compatible hosts.

ritcgab 2y ago

Duplicity is my go because it integrates so well with pgp signing/encryption. Other popular alternatives like borg and restic just do not have it.

aftbit 2y ago
I do wish there were a way to allow a machine to perform backups without also allowing to read them. I generate per-machine secret keys for restic, then encrypt those keys to a set of GPG recipients, and store them alongside the backup data. I did have to roll my own solution for this using s3cmd etc but its not too bad.
aborsy 2y ago
This is an important feature. A gpg key can be offline or in Yubikey.

CGamesPlay 2y ago

I built a tool on top of restic to host git repositories on untrusted infrastructure. Its been working fine for my small low traffic projects for years, I only sync the fork every few months. https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic

PeterStuer 2y ago

I wish backup program sites would provide an easy upfront capability statement that includes: - types of backups supported (volume, fileset, ...) - differciality support (incremental, resumable, dedup, ...) - support for (always) open file bakup - filetype/ path restrictions (very large files, max pathlenght, ...) - restore options ( bare metal, selective, backup mountable as volume, ...) This would make it far easier to see if it ia worth checking out

giuseony 2y ago

Since I'm a big user of proxmox and all my systems are debian-based I recently began to use proxmox backup server also for my physical machines! It's quite fast, supports defuplication and I can donwload or mount backup archives. It sadly lacks a good ux, but I'm still evaulating it because pbs is a tool that I'm already using heavily, so I don't mind reducing the amount of individual software needed to carry on my work.

lizknope 2y ago

In the 90's I remember using various backup tools that had their own custom format. I decided that I wanted my backup to be just wanted files on a normal filesystem without being stored in some kind of special format. I realize that this means compression and block level deduplication is harder but those are tradeoffs that I can accept. I've been using rsnapshot (or it's predecessor script) for 20 years now. It's a wrapper around rsync that gives you snapshots that save space by using hard links. I can compare versions with diff. I can restore files with cp -a https://rsnapshot.org/ https://rsnapshot.org/

wazoox 2y ago
Yes rsnapshot is fantastic. Plus with some simple configuration you can make your "rsnapshots" appear as legitimate snapshots from your Samba server to Windows clients.

crossroadsguy 2y ago

Seriously try restic with Backrest. I had stopped using restic for almost two years after I got tired of tinkering with my local custom scripts to keep restic setup on my mac running. Then I found Backrest. Oh and it lets you use the snapshop browser right in the UI. That's kinda nice. It's really simple and in active development https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest. The dev (lead dev) https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/discussions https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/discussions is very responsive. I know many comments have said it but I also wanted to add it just because backrest is what made restic usable for me again. Vorta is a favourite backup GUI but somehow I am finding backrest even simpler (although would have loved it if it was a tiny menu bar kinda app). Is there something like Deja Dup on Mac? I am planning to find and add another remote repo now (in addition to b2; and hopefully much cheaper which might be a tough one as b2 is kinda dirt cheap especially for small GBs) so that I can include some more of my less critical files in the additional backup set.

dpbriggs 2y ago

It's on my TODO list to add Restic support to BorgTUI[0]. It supports Rustic but the beta nature and iffy performance leaves something to be desired. [0] https://github.com/dpbriggs/borgtui https://github.com/dpbriggs/borgtui