In a home LAN I have a win11 pc used for normal office stuff, with documents, outlook pst files and MS SQL server with a bunch of databases. In the past I was archiving this manually directly on the pc, copying files to external drive, doing the full backup of SQL dbs beforhand with sql scripts in ssms.
On the same LAN I have a raspberry pi 4, which acts as a fileserver, web and media server etc. My goal would be to use it also as a backup server, remotely initiating regular backup jobs of the win11 pc and saving incremental backups on the pi hard drive and easily checking the statistics. Is something like this possible with restic?
My concerns are outlook files and sql databases, beacuse these are used by the system during the backup. Can restic also backup sql dbs (into bak files) or must this be done by other means?
Does someone already have similar setup and could give an advice if I should use restic in my case and what would be the best approach?
Yes, but note that you need to run the restic client on the Windows machine. How you trigger that (manually, scheduled, by a remote call that runs it on the Windows machine, etc) is not something that restic is concerned with.
Yes, but only as files in the filesystem. If there’s a risk that data change during the backup, you should manage that separately, e.g. by making database dumps. Restic does have support for filesystem snapshots using Windows’ VSS through the --use-fs-snapshot option.
Restic does not have application-specific awareness or processing like e.g. Veeam does for some software, the closest you get is that it can use a filesystem snapshot. See also this reply for more comments on this topic: Does restic snapshot provide crash consistency? - #4 by rawtaz
Running the rest-server on a Pi, in append-only mode, will give you a simple, reliable destination to send restic backups to. On the Pi itself you can run check/forget/prune.