Hi forum,
with our ISP company we are trying a lot of backup software for choose one that could help us to replace actual backup-as-a-service solution.
Looking around and testing restic we thought that it can, with some feature improvement, do what we are looking for.
From our point of view, we have some devels that can help for add some features, but all of this are, leave me to say “external”, to the restic main process: we are thinking to create a simple web-GUI, a process that drive and control restic process (with a wrapper that call with a system call restic process and say what to do) and also a centralized server that instructs the control process and receive the output from it (indirectly from restic).
All these need some restic new features that we aren’t able to devel (we aren’t go-lang devels). Features like: -json for backup, prune and all the switches that are heavy time-spending, vss (windows shadow copy), http server that communicate the restic status (similar like objective with the -json, but with a more not-interactive implementation).
This features will be open source at the end of the process.
Now the question: a lot of open source project accept money contribution for help the development process. Does restic community do the same?
Thanks for the praise! We’re discussed donations #884, but decided not to offer any option to do that. Raising and distributing money in an Open Source project always leads to tensions that need to be carefully managed, and I’d rather spend my time coding and helping people. I’m doing this as a spare-time for-fun project, so while I’m trying to give a bit of support, it’s not guaranteed, and it may happen that I’ll be unavailable for a week or four. The very nice community here in the forum and on GitHub will do their best to help out, though!
What worked in the past was that a company donated time of one of their Go developers to implement features they needed, under the project’s guidance in the open as a pull request on GitHub.
Some of the features you mentioned will be beneficial to the project, and in these cases it’s likely that a PR would be merged, but for all features: please open an issue on GitHub first and let us discuss it before you start working on it (or base your product/server on it)! All code contributions must be carefully considered, and we’ve rejected PRs before. After all, we’re the ones who need to maintain the features once the initial development work is done, and sometimes it seems very attractive to add a feature quickly, which then may turn out to be a maintenance burden later on when people start using it.
I’m actually almost done with this, and depending on your exact requirements, it might be very close to meeting your needs: https://relicabackup.com. You can sign up there for updates.
I would like to discuss your specific needs. Could I email you to talk about it?
Thanks for reply.
I understand very well your point of view. I was a spare-time open source devel in the past too and I had the same problem.
Now we had created a create a company that does either devels (that often release the code with open-source licence) and also provide as-a-service services and have, call they, different time needs, with our customers. And from here my idea to a money contribution was born.
However, don’t worry, I’ll continue to help you and all the restic community with bug reports and, I hope soon, PR and patch submits
