4 posts were split to a new topic: Wikipedia page about restic
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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I will not be short but I think a summary of my journey will give more context.
My backup process needed to improve before I upgrade by Ubuntu system : some files copied to a limited cloud, others to a USB key, a backup 3 times a year with DAR configured for me by a colleague and I never checked that the backup worked. I started reading on what is a good plan for backup before looking for good and quite simple tool.
Reading about 20 sites/blogs on backup, I realized I had no backup strategy with lots of data I could not reproduce if they were lost. DAR was too complicated for me and I was not confortable. Most of this reading material was aimed for IT professionals or advanced users (heavy use of cloud, ssh, rsync + script, etc.) until I found one blog explaining why I did backup the wrong way and presenting a simplified version of 3-2-1 strategy. This guy was sitting next to me looking at my “backup” process and pin pointing all my weaknesses. I needed a serious work to recover.
This leads to 2 blogs comparing restic, borg and kopia. I found others favoring borg and after reading a bit how to use it I was about to go for it. Then I heard about plakar which looked “simple”. Finally, I found another one talking about bit change, SSD vs HDD vs DVD.
Looking for a specific strategy for personal PC with little cloud involved and more DVD involved, I asked AI about general reputation. The conclusion was that restic had a solid reputation for its reliability, almost no configuration and was simple to use. Looking to those sources I found a blog of a French guy explaining how to use it. It feel the proper tool and the proper strategy (3-2-1).
I did not mention Grsync which I installed and almost used to transfer data to a Windows laptop as a “backup” until I realized it was not a backup if I synced back and forth while switching from one computer to the other one. Those readings helped me to distinguish synchronizing to the cloud and backup. I took me several days (I was in holidays) but I am now more educated, my strategy is more advanced. I am still playing in sandbox but I feel I made the right choice.
You did not ask but I will add 2 points which convinced me to go for restic:
- on the forum, the community looked supportive and pretty nice to guys like me (not much advanced on restic, on backup and even on how to properly run / set up a system). It matters to me because there are much more people needing a good backup tool than people able to understand and configure a good backup tool…
- the documentation is one of the best I ever saw on free software. Not the usual Reference and User Manuals but it is fine!
Thanks for this to dev, testers, doc team, and the supporting community in this forum.
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In my case, things turned out to be pretty basic. Previously, we used a wide variety of backup services—from enterprise-grade solutions like Veem to all sorts of Bash scripts. But at one point, I was tasked with setting up a regular backup for a mail server containing 4 TB of data. As you can imagine, doing this on a regular basis without a centralized utility is, to put it mildly, difficult and resource-intensive. But after a quick search online, I found a wonderful utility called RESTIC. At the time, it seemed to me that Restic was made for this task. Millions of small data files and index files that remain virtually unchanged for long periods of time, but whose indexes do change. And Restic handles this perfectly.
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I came here as a longterm kopia user when I read the following thread in the kopia forum about missing blobs and how kopia can not cope with it while restic can:
I did my own tests and confirmed the findings in the kopia forum. That was my last act as kopia user 
In the meantime I have migrated all my kopia repos to restic. And I never looked back.
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