How I installed the last restic version on Ubuntu

Getting Help
1

My PC runs an old release of Ubuntu which has a very old version of restic. Ubuntu often has a conservative policy on application version so one may not have the last version. Before I upgrade my system, I want to backup with the last restic version.

Comment 1 : snap stable relase is 0.14 so it does not solve my problem. I do not know how to installe edge version from terminal… This may be solved in the future.

Comment 2 : French Ubuntu documentation states that restic version in Ubuntu repository has self-update feature disabled. I understand why but it is not convenient for me…

Comment 3 : restic documentation warns against the risk of outdated version in Linux distribution packages. It did not strike when I read it :flushed_face:.

Comment 4 : there are already some posts on this forum showing the version issue or self-update issue for both Debian and Ubuntu : Restic suddenly complaining of repo version? , Raspbian / Debian apt repo is out of date - installing Restic 0.11 instead of 0.13 , Restic self-update fails in Debian 10 , What happened to self-update on Ubuntu 24.04? . The solution came to me from Ubuntu documentation and is basically the same as @cdhowie suggested in Installation of restic in ubuntu except for the manner to get the binary.

So I installed manually as shown below. Experienced linux users, you can stop reading here…

Get the binary from Releases · restic/restic · GitHub and download the appropriate version (AMD64 for my Intel PC) and the SHA256SUMS file.

Check that the downloaded binary has no issue by opening a terminal in the directory where you downloaded the binary and type sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS. There will be a long output with the list of all binaries including yours. On the line of your binary, there should be a OK / successful comment (mine is in French so I cannot confirm the wording in English).

Unzip with bunzip2followed by the name of the binary.

Change the permission with chmod +x followed by the name of the binary so it can be executed.

Move the executable to ~/.bin/local (you will not need root privileges).

Enjoy your up-to-date restic from any directory !

2 Likes
2

Note that for this to work, ~/.bin/local has to be bart of your PATH environment variable. You can check if it is using echo $PATH.

3

Just to confirm: I do it very similarly and I uninstalled system restic (sudo apt remove restic). But even when mixing restic 0.14 and 0.18, I never had incompatibilities or corruption (of course some things don’t work in the older versions). Great job by the restic authors!

1 Like