Browse restic backup from another device

Getting Help
1

Hello, I’m looking for a backup solution and am trying to see if restic could fit my use-case.

Basically, I want to backup data from a NAS to a remote cloud (Storj). I’m already using one of synology’s in-house solution for this (hyper backup), but I’m worried about the fact that if for whatever reason I can’t use the NAS anymore, I’m also loosing the ability to restore or even browse the files on the remote location, because they’re encrypted with Synology/Hyper backup’s own solution.

I’m hoping that migrating from this backup solution to restic would resolve this problem.

Is it possible to browse and restore a restic remote backup from another device than the one that initiated the restic backups?
For instance, could I somehow use restic on my laptop and browse my backups on Storj from there even though those backups were initiated and sent to Storj from the NAS?

Thanks a lot in advance.

2

Btw. You do not need NAS hardware to access hyperbackup:

As for restic it is also cross platform and you can access your backups from any machine where restic can run.

3

You do not need NAS hardware to access hyperbackup

That’s nice, didn’t know that. I’ll eventually migrate away from the Syno to a custom nas/server though so I still need to plan another solution.

Anyways, good to know restic can do what I want too! So how would that work, do I simply re-create the restic repository on the secondary device with the same password and same backend info, and the backups will be there if I do restic list?

4

To be clear. You do not recreate repo:) but only config and then you can access your repository from any other machine.

Also you can use the same repository to backup multiple machines if needed.

5

I understand that I won’t be actually recreating the repo on the remote location, but I’m not sure I understand how it’d look concretely.
As far as restic on the secondary device is concerned would I not need to run restic -r [repo] init? How would that work then?

6

restic -r [repo] init is run only once when a new repo is initiated.

7

Okay so let’s say I did restic -r [repo] init on the NAS, made some backups etc. The repo is a remote cloud.

Then some time later, let’s say the NAS crashed and is unusable. I have a laptop with restic installed. What do I need to do to access the repo that was initiated on the NAS?

8

Cloud access and repo credentials. That’s it.

For example for sftp repo to list stored snapshots you simply run:

restic -r sftp:user@host:/srv/restic-repo snapshots
enter password for repository:
ID        Date                 Host    Tags   Directory        Size
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
40dc1520  2015-05-08 21:38:30  kasimir        /home/user/work  20.643GiB
79766175  2015-05-08 21:40:19  kasimir        /home/user/work  20.645GiB
bdbd3439  2015-05-08 21:45:17  luigi          /home/art        3.141GiB
590c8fc8  2015-05-08 21:47:38  kazik          /srv             580.200MiB
9f0bc19e  2015-05-08 21:46:11  luigi          /srv             572.180MiB

It can be run from any computer with access to sftp server where repo is stored.

9

Alright cool, thanks a lot for taking the time to explain it to me!

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