Hello,
I am trying to work out whether restic is the best solution for my requirements. I am running Windows and the plan is to back up a large amount of data from a PC to Box, similar to Dropbox or Google Drive.
Ideally, I would like restic to back up files automatically as soon as it detects a new file or a change to an existing file. Is that possible on Windows, or does restic need to be run periodically?
Some there are lots of small and some large files, and the ISP upload speed is only moderate, so how efficiently does restic handles this. In particular, if a large file is modified, does restic only upload the changed portions of the file, rather than re-uploading the entire file?
For example, if I have 4 TB of data that has already been backed up to Box using restic, and I subsequently add another 100 GB of data, would the next snapshot only need to upload the additional 100 GB, or would restic need to upload the entire 4.1 TB again?
I’m essentially trying to understand how restic handles backups and changes to existing large files, and whether it is a suitable solution given the available upload bandwidth.
I know Box has its own sync/backup solution, but I have found it doesn’t work particularly well when the data is stored on a separate drive rather than the C: drive. This is one of the reasons I’m looking at restic as an alternative.
You’ll have to check which backends Box support – e.g. if they support an S3 compatible API you could use the S3 backend. If there’s no suitable backend in restic, you can use the rclone backend instead, giving access to all the backends that rclone in turn supports.
You’ll have to run it periodically, it does not have built-in file change detection.
It handles it very well. You can set the compression to max if you want, although auto is usually way good enough. It also comes down to how compressible your data is – if it’s not very compression-friendly, there’s not much to gain from compression. Regardless, restic will do what can be done, basically.
Restic handles it pretty much as efficiently as it can. It deduplicates and compresses, so you’ll only send what needs to be sent. Two largely identical files won’t be transferred twice, for example. Yes, restic uses chunking to split files into different parts and only backs up the parts that changed since the last backup of that file.
Correct, only the added/changed data would be uploaded, plus some more metadata of course. It would not upload 4.1 TB.
I have tested it out with rclone, and it seems to be working well.
Is there a recommended GUI setup for Rustic? I have seen a few options, but I’m not sure if there’s an official one. I’m looking for something that’s open source.
No, there’s no officially recommended one, but there’s been a few recent GUIs, for example devins.page/restray at main · Tangled is pretty new and intends to be cross-platform. That said, there are other ones as well.