Really like restic

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Hi, just a quick note here to say thanks for Restic :smiley:

I used Borg for a few years, for backup of my home PC to local USB disk and to Google Cloud Storage. I wrote a long shell script to run Borg to the USB HDD, then ran rclone-sync of the Borg repo files to GCS.

One day I wanted to spot-check the cloud backup, see if my files were really there. I mounted the GCS bucket with rclone. Then tried to borg-mount that (which I had done before) and it failed with a cryptic message. So I had no way to check the backup except to download them all and check them locally.

So that got me thinking about switching to another backup solution, one that had backends (GCS, S3, sftp, etc.).

So I tried Duplicati, Hashbackup, and then Duplicacy. All had drawbacks. For example, some didn’t have a mount feature, or the mount only worked on the local side. One of them forced you to run local and remote backups (even if you only wanted to run a local backup that day); I found I could get around this with a cryptic environment variable :face_with_raised_eyebrow:. Some required a password file and and you had to keep track of where you stored that (instead of just a password). More than one had no --exclude-if-present feature, which I needed (note: old-fashioned tar has had that feature for years, as does Borg). Some required you to provide a new version name every time you did backup (instead generating one automatically). Many of the command-line specs were overly complicated, with too many advanced setttings that I didn’t care about. One of the apps dropped dot-directories everywhere it went.

So then I tried Restic, which I didn’t know much about. I was amazed that it had all the features I wanted and was easy to use. I re-wrote my backup scripts to use Restic and they were 60% smaller. I especially like having the SFTP backend, which I use to run a daily cronjob backup of a 100 or so important files to my VPS. The first backup to GCS using Restic took a few days (~150GB), then I simply deleted the Borg buckets. I can mount the GPS restic backup with a single restic command, no problem. Likewise with the sftp backup.

Borg is good at what it does. And I’m sure the other apps work well for some folks. But Restic is the best!

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Thank you so much for giving us a detailed background of your backup software endeavors, it’s great to hear where users come from and what they tried, etc.

Just a heads up, the mount command in restic may go away in restic for macOS in the future, because of licensing issues in the FUSE library, please see macOS: drop fuse support (restic mount) · Issue #3096 · restic/restic · GitHub for more background. We’ll see how it goes with all this, but in the long run we’d like to get one of the WebDAV or WUI options going as a platform-neutral replacement.

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Thanks for info about FUSE. I use Ubuntu, so do you think the FUSE licensing will be involved with that?

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At this point there’s nothing suggesting a licensing issue with the Linux FUSE implementation, so I don’t see why Linux FUSE would be dropped by the FUSE library we use (Bazil), so no. It’s a problem on macOS due to the FUSE library for macOS licensing.

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