I got lucky. I was looking at backup software since CrashPlan decided to screw over all their home servers. I had found a bunch and was using Minio to test S3 integration and decide to look for backup solutions written in Go which is when I came across restic. I’m glad I did because it’s what I settled on after looking at a bunch of both free and paid solutions.
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I was pointed here by a forum post on geekzone.co.nz. I looked at many backup options, but Restic seems fairly mature, cross platform, with enough features and a nice focus on simplicity.
I was looking for backup for my Linux server. I’ve been using a variety of things, most often Borg backup, which I was relatively happy with. The issue for me is Borg renames (or recreates) its backup file every day, which means I have to upload most of my data to S3 fresh each day. That increases my bandwidth bill, and AWS bandwidth is fairly expensive.
I also had a failure with my Windows PC backups, which use CloudBerry Backup. I’ve never had great confidence in CloudBerry, for no reason I could really put my finger on. The deduplication isn’t very effective, seems to be within a file rather than global. However during the most recent upgrade the database became corrupt and I had to do a full backup to rebuild it. That’s still underway, but it looks like it’s going to take the better part of a day to process 2TB of data to a USB3 disk. That’s really not very efficient - it seems to be uploading everything fresh. I don’t know if I’m going to keep my incremental version history or not - I guess I’ll find out at some point.
I also tried Duplicati, but there are too many restore bugs. I found one that took a year to restore, they called it “a user interface bug”. Once that was fixed I found another two days later. I think I’ll give it a few years - it has a nice web interface and seems to have a good core, but it’s not mature enough I think.
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In my first round of search for deduplicated backup software, restic simply didn’t popup. I believe one of my main sources was the Wikipedia page comparison of backup software. restic isn’t on there. I settled on bup (supports cygwin). It worked for a while, but as time went on, its poor performance of purge (or gc in bup) and its lack of encryption bothered me.
In my second round of search, I saw a post somewhere (forgot where) with nice words about restic, and linked the archlinux wiki page synchronization and backup programs. I filtered the table based on my criteria (chunk-based dedupe, well maintained, encryption, supports Windows, FOSS), and quickly restic became one of the top contenders. A closer look at homepages, docs, and forums, quickly made clear that restic was the right choice for me. In particular,
- Filippo Valsorda’s blog post on restic cryptography
- restic’s good documentation of the repository format
- blog post on mutual support between restic and rclone
really drew me in.
I strongly suggest someone add restic to the Wikipedia page comparison of backup software. This can possibly increase restic’s exposure to a much greater extent.
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I’ve always used duplicity for my personal backups in a external drive and rclone for some important files for GDrive. So, I started looking for a better solution for online backups and somehow I read about borg in Reddit. I realise borg can’t upload to a cloud storage unless is via ‘ssh’ and in the same subreddit I read a person talking about restic because he was looking for an online solution too. I searched about it and read some tutorials, comparisons and reviews. I tried it using the REST server for rclone first and couldn’t be happier about it, so I kept using it. I also changed my local backup from duplicity to borg because they use compression and it really saves a lot of space of my external hard drive (1TB of data is now about 75GB; mostly because of de-duplication but compression saves some extra space) and duplicity was taking a lot of space because of the full backups that all we know is so annoying. So, that’s it.
We already tried that, it did not go well. @rawtaz wrote a page for restic on Wikipedia, but unfortunately it got rejected. Having a dedicated page is required by Wikipedia’s standards, this is in the source code of the page:
IMPORTANT NOTE – READ BEFORE ADDING AN ENTRY
This is a list of NOTABLE backup software, as judged by Wikipedia’s notability policies, obtained by searching Wikipedia for WP:N. Please don’t add external links or wikilinks to nonexistent articles – instead, read our notability policies and write the article first, ensuring to demonstrate notability. Backup software without articles, redlinks, external links, and links to articles that aren’t about the backup software in question will be pruned periodically. Fill in the background info too, please, to make this article useful.
Important note ends.
Would it be possible to write a full page for restic then? Some programs (e.g. duplicati, bup…) listed there seem to have about the same popularity as restic, although older.
Sure it’s possible, when someone spends time and energy to convince the Wikipedia people restic is “relevant” enough to be included in Wikipedia. Be aware that this process will likely be long and tedious 
I found it through a list of B2 integrations - I was using B2, and going through their list of integrations, and saw restic in there. Checking out new backup software is a bit of a “hobby” of mine, so gave it a look, and fell in love 
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I was searching for alternatives to Arq, and I think I found Restic through search results or the Backblaze website.
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The was a small article in c’t about restic. So I tried how it looks and feels.
Great: that old unix spirit. One purpose- one tool. And it works fine.
By the way: I just wrote a small article on restic in our “sicherheits-berater”. This is some kind of newsletter on security (www.sicherheits-berater.de)
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I found restic on this page about tools written in Go while researching Hugo. Then I watched the talk from CCC Cologne and was convinced.
Haven’t tried it yet, but already installed on my Gentoo laptop.
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I was talking about photo backups in Photoprism github repo and everybody was using Restic, so I investigated and now it looks like I’m going to switch from Borg backup to Restic
also guys, check out Photoprism, a self-hosted Google Photos alternative
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I was using BackInTime for a long time. I liked the simple and transparent format, every backup is readable without any extra tool and deduplication is done via hardlinks, no differences between full and incremental backups, multiple snapshots and a forget-strategy. And it is open source. But it is no longer developed.
So I searched for a replacement and I quickly found tool comparisons that pointed me to restic. And I once worked for CERN and they now use it. Restic has all the advantages backintime had and adds
- encryption (that outweighs the less transparent format)
- intelligent deduplication (works extremely well for small changes in large files, changed metadata, renaming,…)
- many backends
- good command line interface (except the missing config)
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last year I’ve searched for a backup solution and think I first heard about restic in a podcast.
I think it was one of them
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Reddit, hacker news, online forums, software engineer friends, system administrators, comparison lists published online, GitHub stars, etc.
Honestly, I am amazed that some of these high quality open source software are free. I hope we come up with a system that open source developers get paid for the work they do by users. Some sort of licensing. I heard right now it’s a broken system.
Switched from Borg (I still sometimes use Borg for secondary backup).
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How/where did you first get to know about restic, and if at first you didn’t pursue it further, what made you finally do so later on?
I came here looking for alternatives to Cobian Backup, a free program that I have used for years to backup. (Although it does not have good tools to recover the information at a given point and you have to do some manual operations).
But what motivated me most to look for alternatives is that Cobian Backup does not have cloud backup implemented, only FTP.
Searching Google, Reddit, and sites that list alternatives I came across names like Duplicati and Restic.
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I was looking for an alternative to Duplicati, which I have been using for a couple years (probably), but I’ve had some trouble with it. I’m did a search back then and chose duplicati. I must have seen restic back then, and chosen not to follow up on it, probably because of the lack of Gui and the need to have manually managed scripts and cron-jobs, and also almost certainly because of the extremely bad performance listed here - the first hit on a search for ‘performance duplicati vs restic’
Restore time was listed as 57m for restic and 3m28s for Duplicati. Restore duration may not be that essential but that was a crazy difference and given that I didn’t know restic was more reliable at the time, that’s where I stopped.
When looking for an alternative due to me getting suspicious about the source-code-quality and design-choices of Duplicati, I ran into this:
That introduction was so simple, and esp. the diff sold me, even though it might not be very relevant. It just looked like a totally beautiful and made me start believing that made it was at least partially backups-done-right.
Then I tried it out and was a bit shocked at how fast it was to get started on the first backups. Getting set up probably has still turned out to be a hassle with all the various projects and settings and docker-complications but that’s another story.
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@arberg Curiously, we arrived at restic through similar paths (and through the same article). Thanks for the second link.
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