Restic-mount-win: Native Windows mount support via WinFsp (Pure Go, drop-in CLI)

[yanother]

Hi everyone,

Windows users know the struggle of wanting to quickly inspect a restic repository in File Explorer, only to find that `restic mount` is unsupported on Windows.

To solve this without needing WSL, Linux VMs, or third-party web interfaces, I built restic-mount-win — a dedicated standalone CLI that brings native Windows mounting to restic repositories via WinFsp.

Highlights

• Drop-In CLI Experience: If you know `restic mount`, you already know how to use this. It supports the same repository options, flags, and environment variables. Just replace the space with a hyphen:

  # Instead of: restic mount
  restic-mount -r D:\Backup\restic-repo X:

• Native File Explorer Browsing: Mount your repository as a drive letter (e.g. `X:`) or an empty folder, browse snapshot trees, preview files, and copy/restore individual files directly.
• Safe by Default:
  • Holds a shared repository lock while mounted to avoid conflicts with other operations.
  • Protects your system against invalid POSIX characters/reserved names (`CON`, `NUL`, etc.) and case-only collisions safely without mutating files.

Quick Start (Installation)

The easiest way to install is via winget, which automatically handles the required WinFsp driver setup:

winget install --id Yanother.restic-mount

(Note: Windows will ask for administrator approval once during setup if WinFsp isn’t already installed on your machine.)

If you prefer manual setup, standalone binaries (`restic-mount.exe`) are available on the GitHub Releases: Releases · Maki-Daisuke/restic-mount-win · GitHub

I hope this makes managing backups on Windows much smoother! Feedback, questions, and feature requests are always welcome.

[michal-ruzicka]

Wow, great think. I found out about WinFsp whilst using Cryptomator, and it immediately occurred to me that it could probably be used to implement a restic mount on Windows. I’m glad someone actually did it!

However, if you are a Total Commander user, you do not need to install anything at kernel level on your system and can make use of the recently created Total Commander plugins, which only require the standard restic binary and run entirely in user space. It was announced in this forum too: Plugins for Total Commander and Yazi

[yanother]

Thanks for the kind words, @michal-ruzicka! Really glad you like it.

And thank you for sharing the Total Commander / Yazi plugins! That’s definitely a neat alternative for users who already live in those file managers and want a pure user-space solution without installing any kernel drivers.

The main advantage of restic-mount-win is that it exposes the repository as a true, native Windows drive (e.g. R:\) or directory. This means not only File Explorer, but any Windows application—such as VS Code, diff/merge tools, command-line scripts, or media players—can directly read and stream files transparently from the snapshot without an upfront restore.

It’s great to see multiple complementary solutions popping up for Windows users!