A restic client written in rust

Community
21

@Eli6 I have already answered the lines of code question here. Currently, rustic is at about 8.500 lines of code.

About contributors, see

and

TL;DR: restic has 2-4 core developers, rustic so far only me. BTW: I’m looking forward to getting more people involved in rustic :wink:

22

Interesting that you got to implement it in about 10% of the Go code. I thought Rust is lower level and should take more code than Go for the same functionality.

23

In my experience the opposite is the case: Rust allows a much higher level of abstraction than Go does. This results in shorter and “cleaner” code. A good example is the error handling, which in Go is something like:

x, err :=  a.func()
if err != nil {
   return err
}

y, err := x.func2()
if err != nil {
   return err
}

while in Rust it reads:

let y = a.func()?.func2()?;
1 Like
24

I’m happy to announce rustic 0.4.0

New features worth mentioning are:

  • backup option --as-path allows to overwrite the path which is saved in a snapshot
  • Snapshots are extended by label, a description and “created by program”
  • labels allow to group snapshots (and to define parent snapshots for backup) additional to hosts and paths
  • diff now allows to compare dirs in snapshots with local dirs
  • New command repair. rustic repair index is basically the equivalent to restic rebuild-index wheras rustic repair snapshots does what you can only do with restic by compiling Add repair command by aawsome · Pull Request #2876 · restic/restic · GitHub. Note that rustic binaries are available if you need that command to repair a restic repo.

For more information or questions/discussions about this rustic release, please visit rustic 0.4.0 · Discussion #306 · rustic-rs/rustic · GitHub

1 Like
25

I’m happy to announce rustic 0.4.2.

Changes worth mentioning are:

  • bugs w.r.t. rclone versions are fixed as well as other bugs.
  • The command copy has been added. It only works when defining the target repo(s) in the config file in order to not getting confused by --repo2 or --target-repo options.
  • restore to a dir with already existing files is much faster as it allows to only check modification time and file size. To be sure, the option --verify-existing is available to read and verify existing file contents
  • The syntax <SNAPSHOT>:<PATH> now also works with files. For example, it is now possible to restore a single file via rustic restore a4f3:/path/to/file /path/to/destination/
  • diffing with local dirs now by default reads the files to check the contents. This allows for example to do rustic diff a4f3:/path /local/path and all files in /local/path are read and checked if they are identical to the files under /path in the given snapshot.

For more infos or questions, please visit rustic 0.4.2 · Discussion #366 · rustic-rs/rustic · GitHub

2 Likes
26

Nice you compile it yourself.

27

Yes, compiled binaries are availabe for the releases as well as beta builds.

Also note that once you installed a rustic version, rustic self-update is available to get and install the newest release version.

Please open an issue (or submit a PR) if you are missing some platform in the compiled binaries!

Besides this, self-compilation is very easy:

  • Get the source code, e.g. by git clone
  • Install the latest stable Rust toolchain, preferably using rustup
  • Run build.sh (or cargo build --release)

Also, cross-compiling Rust is almost as easy as with Go.

1 Like
28

Today, I’m announcing rustic 0.4.4. I am very proud that rustic in meanwhile got more than 300 stars in github - thanks for you all giving me motivation by this!

Changes worth mentioning are:

  • many bug fixes
  • local backend can have hooks, e.g. to generate par2 files, see How to create par2 parity files for a Restic repository - #12 by alexweiss
  • diff and restore now handle single file targets correctly, i.e. you can do rustic diff <snap>:/path/to/file localfile or rustic restore <snap>:/path/to/file /my/other/filename.
  • warm-up options are now part of the repo configuration and can also be configured in the config file
4 Likes
29

I just wanted to announce that rustic now experimentally supports Windows. As I don’t have a Windows system at hand Iwould like to invite everyone able to use the beta version to test it and report what’s missing.

The beta builds are available here:

If you encounter issues, best is to put them in the tracking issue:
Windows support · Issue #487 · rustic-rs/rustic · GitHub

Thanks a lot for your help!

1 Like
30

I just tried the windows version. Didn’t get far

C:\Users\test> rustic init -r s:\rustic
using no config file (.\rustic.toml doesn't exist)
Error: backend s is not supported!

C:\Users\test>
31

@restician: This is a known issue. As workaround you can use rustic -r local:s:\rustic

32

Thanks!

I hoped rustic would be more compatible on the command line (options) - to avoid learning everything again (might have been also beneficial for project to get more testers “quicker”). But I also noticed that I am not able to open the rustic backup folder with “Restic-Browser”. So I guess rustic is not really a restic client (anymore)? Or I misunderstood, I guess.

33

It is not 100%, but very close. There are some options which have a slightly different name (like the --filter-* options where I found the restic name not a perfect choice) and of course there exists features in rustic which do not exist in restic and vice versa.

If you are referring to the -r local: option, this is only a workaround until repository paths starting with a drive letter are fixed on windows.

I am perfectly able to open and read all repositories created by rustic with Restic-Browser - under Linux. Maybe you encountered a Windows compatibility issue? Windows support of rustic is experimental and might be buggy. Please open an issue or discussion on the rustic project site with the exact error. Thanks a lot!

34

BTW, the latest beta builds should now be able to work with -r s:\rustic, see Windows: Allow repo to start with drive letter by aawsome · Pull Request #495 · rustic-rs/rustic · GitHub.

35

I’m happy to announce rustic 0.5.0.
This version adds many new features, here are some of the most interesting ones:

  • Experimental windows support has been added
  • New command merge allows to merge snapshots.
  • New option --filter-fn allows custom snapshot filter using the Rhai script language. You can use for example rustic snapshots --filter-fn '|sn| sn.host in ["host1", "host2"] && (sn.time > "2020-02-01T12:30' || sn.tags == ["only_this_tag"]). Note that this option is also available for the tag, forget, copy and merge command.
  • command dump and extended file attribute support is now also available.

For more information or questions, visit rustic 0.5.0 · rustic-rs/rustic · Discussion #529 · GitHub