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

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

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.

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/

http://duplicity.gitlab.io/

https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/

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. The dev (lead dev) 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.

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/

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.)

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.

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

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.)

Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it compare to:

- Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs

- Kopia https://kopia.io

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic

i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups like in duplicity

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.

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

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

Discussion of my approach to using restic + rclone + Backblaze B2 here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056

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.

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

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

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.

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).

Related:

Restic 0.17.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 - July 2024 (5 comments)

Restic – Simple Backups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 - Jan 2024 (14 comments)

Restic 0.15.0 Released - 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 - Aug 2022 (5 comments)

Restic 0.13.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 - March 2022 (66 comments)

Restic – Backups Done Right - 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 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)

Restic Cryptography (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 - June 2021 (5 comments)

Restic – Backups Done Right - 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 - Aug 2019 (18 comments)

Append-only backups with restic and rclone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 - March 2019 (42 comments)

Restic Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 - Aug 2017 (36 comments)

Restic – Backups done right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 - Aug 2015 (1 comment)

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.

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

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

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

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

Rustic is better

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