I’m looking for a windows local backup solution and have been happy w/ Restic at home backup up to a NAS and Backblaze B2 on linux. It seems Windows doesn’t have a good built-in backup system, and macrium/acronis require annual subscriptions. To backup a local data directory to an external drive, would Restic (I am assuming WSL has to be installed) work well? Or are there other open source solutions that would be more appropriate? The lack of tools like rsync/restic on Windows really is glaring.
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edit: the official docs says to install via the Scoop package manager - I guess this is the preferred/more robust way to do things?
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Hey, welcome to the forum.
restic is a stand-alone binary, so you can just download the latest version from the release page and run it from the command prompt, same as you would in linux. If you go this route, you can use restic self-update to keep it up to date. Or if you prefer, you can use scoop as the docs mention. I’d say use whichever seems easiest to you 
There is no need for WSL, there are native windows builds of restic available, and I wouldn’t recommend running restic from inside WSL anyway (as WSL2 in particular has poor performance when accessing the windows filesystem).
If you don’t go the scoop route, here’s a link to the 0.17.1 release on github, and here is a direct link to the 64-bit windows binary.
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Is perfect! And you don’t need WSL, just rclone and restic (both just 1 exe file)
Just a heads up, I recommend that you wait a few days until restic 0.17.2 is released. It is just waiting for some administrative factors and will be released any day now.
That release contains a fix for the problem mentioned here: Errors found by check: (1) Invalid type "irregular" (2) ciphertext verification failed - #2 by fede (PR here: backup: fix handling of files with type irregular by MichaelEischer · Pull Request #5057 · restic/restic · GitHub)
Even if you were to run or have already run restic 0.17.1, you can always fix the issue once you have restic 0.17.2, so don’t worry about it either way.
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I want to echo shd2h on this. I used restic for years without touching WSL and it worked very well.
I pushed backups to Wasabi and local disks with no problems and restored many TB of data flawlessly.
I’ve since switched to Linux everywhere and that went off without a hitch too.
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It works out of box with Windows version. Turn off or and exclude restic from Windows Defender because it slows don’t restic a lot in backups.
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@tc_pala Restic 0.17.2 is now out, you can get it from Releases · restic/restic · GitHub .
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I have been using Restic to backup a windows machine to an external usb connected drive for a couple of years. Things have been good. I run restic in PowerShell as Administrator. Installing PowerShell by Microsoft I recommend using an exclude file because Microsoft puts much junk under various directories that you likely do not want or need to backup. I use the [–use-fs-snapshot] (Backing up — restic 0.17.2 documentation). Since my workstation has quite a few cpus I set the compression to be max. Write down your Restic password where you will be able to find it incase there is an emergency like a house fire so that you can grab the usb drive and the password. I have used restic to backup files on a previous machine and restore them all on my current machine. If you want an offsite backup then you can pay to use disks on AWS or other cloud provider.
The forum is friendly so while many users have unix / linux there are many using windows.
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