hello,
i am planning to backup my win11 laptop with restic. I was thinking about kopia but it doesnt support VSS, thats the reason why i drop it.
Is there any best practice how to backup win 11 machine with scripts? What folders include / skip etc?
Also i assume there is still no gui for restic?
I want to replace arq with restic ,… hope its a good idea? Also i want to push backup to restic rest server that i run on my truenas. From truenas i will sync encrypted backup to s3/google etc.
I backup my Win 10 with restic using the VSS option. I recommend telling your virus checking program to ignore the restic exe file because reading the large quantities of data causes the virus checker to look harder at the program is doing which slows down the backup. I suggest dumping the windows registry to a file using the RegEdit.exe /e command.
There are lots and logs of directories which could be skipped if you assume that you can reinstall Windows from a disk. Be sure to back up the users/appdata because some apps store data there.
Restic works so well that it was the method I used to migrate from an old pc to the current one.
@punchcard thanks,
what backend do u use? Rest-server or minion or just fs?
dumping win reg for a what purpose?
Do you mind to share a script?
Also VSS is not default during backup execution?
One more question - once u backup data, and want to do a restore - do u backup somehow mbr, or u just do fresh OS install and restore data?
I also use Acronis True image for a image backup, so i can restore from the image OS latest state; but such a backup is executed 1per day, so i need restic for a more frequent files backup.
Also I assume restic has to be executed via schedule so it might be good to add something as real-time backup using ViceVersa PRO and VVEngine – TGRMN Software? I havent tested that software so no clue now.
The backend is just an external drive only plugged in when the backup is running. For my purposes, I use an internal hard drive as the Windows File HIstory and the external for the restic backup. I run the restic backup about once per week. This is protection against ransomware.
I have never actually needed to restore the win reg but so many unknown things get stored there I want to ensure it is backed up.
For my needs I only restore a single file or a small subdirectory of files.
The script I use is grungy so I’d recommend searching through the forum for links to scripts because they sill be much better quality.
I’m also new to restic and currently I run a simple backup.cmd per scheduled task to backup some folders on my work-pc.
includes, excludes, repo and password are defined in txt-files.
vss is also enabled.
I’m currently not on my pc so I’m not sure what are my includes and excludes.
But I’m sure that includes contains C:\Users and excludes some folders inside C:\Users
to find appropiate excludes I first did two backups with the same includes and checked the diff of both snapshots for changed files that I can ignore.
I too use restic on some Windows 10 and one Windows 11 machine. I only back up the user’s “home directory”, or in some cases just their Documents directory. It works fine, regardless.
