I'm a restic user, but have resisted the urge to attempt a bikeshed for a long time, mostly due to perf. It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC). Drives me nuts to watch it chugging along backing up or listing snapshots at nowhere close to the IO rate of the system while still making the fans run. Despite that it still seems to be the best free software option around
You could try running rustic on your repository. It should be a drop-in for restic and maybe it's faster? I would actually be very interested in this. Would be great if you could do that and report back.
> It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC).
Hi, can you elaborate more on those two points? (Specially, what makes the index format so bad?) Or link to somewhere I can learn more
Since I'm a big user of proxmox and all my systems are debian-based I recently began to use proxmox backup server also for my physical machines! It's quite fast, supports defuplication and I can donwload or mount backup archives.
It sadly lacks a good ux, but I'm still evaulating it because pbs is a tool that I'm already using heavily, so I don't mind reducing the amount of individual software needed to carry on my work.
Try BackRest if you want a nice frontend to Restic. You can configure Restic from the command line but it's pretty awkward. BackRest has a nice simple web GUI and makes basic automation very easy. https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
I'm surprised no one is selling Restic hosting as a straight up service. BackBlaze works well with Restic but the configuration is a little manual and clumsy. A packaged solution would be a nice thing.
Restic is very very good. My only nervousness is the backup format is so opaque, you need a working copy of Restic to restore from it. The format is documented though and of course the code is open source, so I think it's probably fine in practice.
Other popular choices include borg, duplicity, and duplicati.
After evaluating these and others mentioned in the comments, I ended up using borg with borgmatic to define homelab backups with yaml files that are version controlled in gitea and deployed using ansible.
I also use duplicity to back up my sister in laws storefront website to backblaze. I've been quite happy with both.
I chose restic because borg was slow, buggy and an unwieldy pile of Python, not the best language for deployment on heterogeneous Linux systems.
Restic on the other hand is slow, but never crashed on me and is distributed as a single binary.
The only thing I dislike about restic is that it does not have a simple config file where you define your backup settings. Instead I had to write my own backup.sh that I deploy everywhere on my personal and production machines. Paired with rsync.net for storage and healthchecks.io for notifications.
I've never had any crashing or big issues with borg, and it's generally considered to be faster than restic. I'm sure there are more recent benchmarks, but as of Dec 2022, borg wins by a fair bit [1].
For installation, I set up a dedicated virtualenv for borg and borgmatic installation then symlink into /usr/local/bin. This is also automated with ansible and has worked on every distro and version I've used. The latest version does require python 3.9.0, but that's already 4 years old.
I write Python day to day, but even I use Restic for the single binary. I take a lot of comfort in being able to keep the backup executable adjacent to the backup blobs. While I believe Borg now has a distributable binary, Go has it in its blood to make easy deployment without tricks.
Duplicity is solid, I’ve been using it since over a decade, and it’s a standard package on Debian-based distributions. Never had any hiccups (and I run regular backup validations).
These threads about backup tools come up regularly, and I always wonder if I’m missing something important about the other tools.
I used Duplicity (via the Gnome Déjà Dup GUI) for years, but Borg turned out to be a lot faster at making the backups, at least for my laptop home dir backups. Like an order of magnitude faster. I don't think I ever tried to hand-configure Duplicity, though.
I have tested all of these also, and settled on borg + borgmatic. It has been absolutely rock solid. Borgmatic just rounds everything together in such a nice way. The documentation is great.
I'm pushing it all to a Hetzner storage box, as well as a local NAS. Super affordable!
That command works well and accomplishes some of what rincr what built to solve. For example, when I mention browse-ability, I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers.
I also needed both "pull" (backup remote files) and "push" (backup local files) backup features and if I'm not mistaken restic still only supports the "push" model.
If you're doing pull to prevent remotes from destroying old backups (in case of malware takeover, etc), this can be solved by running rest-server with --append-only
> I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers.
This means the backups are not encrypted though, and is something you really have to think twice before requiring
> "pull" (backup remote files)
You can mount the server to backup on the backup host, or you can ssh from the backup host to the server to backup, call `tar cf - /folder`, and ingest that from stdin on the backup host. Both will retransmit the totality of the files to backup
Restic is great! It has worked flawlessly for me for several years.
Anyone knows if there is plan to add Reed Solomon erasure coding, just in case there will be errors in repository? Something like Par2.
Asymmetric encryption could also be useful in some situations. Perhaps they could just use Age for the asymmetric encryption backend (unfortunately Age offers only 128 bits of security in its symmetric encryption, so it’s not recommended for long term storage, because of the save-now decrypt-later attack). But I expect a stable quantum resistant plug-in appearing next year or so.
One thing that I like about Restic is that you can automatically do a test restore of a subset (e.g. 1%, 5%, 8%) of your data, so that you can check for problems on the remote automatically.
I built a tool on top of restic to host git repositories on untrusted infrastructure. Its been working fine for my small low traffic projects for years, I only sync the fork every few months. https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic
I've been using Restic for servers, but ended up going with Kopia for machines that are not always on, like laptops. It has the advantage that it will take something of an opportunistic approach where it will start backing up if it hasn't done so in a while, and seems to be able to restart with aplomb if it gets interrupted (machine shutdown or laptop lid closed).
That and being able to have multiple machines writing to a shared repository at the same time is handy. I have the kids' Windows computers both backing up to the same repo to save a bit of storage. (Now if only Kopia supported VSS on Windows without mucking around with dubious scripts.)
I perused the Rustic website and they have a direct comparison of Restic here: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm. At face value I thought it was just, "because it's Rust," but it does appear to have a few additional features.
Rustic was started by a former restic contributor. My impression at the time was that he was frustrated with poor collaboration from restic maintainers (slow/no response to his PRs). So it's a bit more than just "rewrite-it-in-rust".
Many of his rejected/ignored restic PRs ended up being features in rustic: cold storage support, config file support, resumable operations, webdav server, etc.
I switched to rustic a couple of months ago due to it being able to filter based on .gitignore files. Have done a few test restores and everything has worked well so far
A killer feature rustic has over restic is built-in support for .gitignore files. So all your dependencies and build output is automatically ignored in your backups.
At first I thought that sounded great, but then I realized that that would exclude files that I want to be backed up, like `dir-locals-2.el`, which should be excluded from git, but should also be backed up. There doesn't seem to be a great solution to that in general.
Nice. Using `.gitignore` would simplify my Restic, Borg/Borgmatic, and Rsync-based backup scripts/configs. (Right now, I end up duplicating the same information in a few places, not very well.)
Restic is awesome for moderate operational scale, but when it's got to backup thousands of storage block devices with arbitrary number of files on them, it just doesn't really work.
Is there anything cool people use for Ceph-RBD backups nowadays?
For now, the only thing in the OSS world that doesn't choke at this scale is Benji, but it looks like it's not really maintained anymore, and I worry it may not support newer Ceph versions.
My Thinkpad has a tiny SDHC slot. I put a 1 terabyte SDHC card in it (~$80) and have a cron job take hourly Restic snapshots of my primary storage. It's been reliable and has bailed me out more than once.
I do wish there were a way to allow a machine to perform backups without also allowing to read them. I generate per-machine secret keys for restic, then encrypt those keys to a set of GPG recipients, and store them alongside the backup data. I did have to roll my own solution for this using s3cmd etc but its not too bad.
Restic 0.17.1 was released last month. The home page says "During initial development (versions prior to 1.0.0), maintainers and developers will do their utmost to keep backwards compatibility and stability, although there might be breaking changes without increasing the major version."
I’m more fan of BorgBackup, but you have to couple it with I.e. rclone for it to make backups to cloud object storage. But that opinion is based on my particular use case, probably would be using restic if direct to cloud was a better choice.
Interesting, I'll give this a try. I'm hoping one day to retire my subscription/cloud-based back-ups with something docker based that still back-ups to multiple instances (local and remote).
sometimes you just must have a new full backup every N days/weeks. it a more "smooth" way to deal with potential corruption in repo that might be undetected (without dealing with all suggested workarounds) and in some cases compliance/certification requires it
I'm a restic user, but have resisted the urge to attempt a bikeshed for a long time, mostly due to perf. It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC). Drives me nuts to watch it chugging along backing up or listing snapshots at nowhere close to the IO rate of the system while still making the fans run. Despite that it still seems to be the best free software option around
You could try running rustic on your repository. It should be a drop-in for restic and maybe it's faster? I would actually be very interested in this. Would be great if you could do that and report back.
> It's index format seems to be slow and terrible and the chunking algorithm it uses (rabin fingerprints) is very slow compared to more recent alternatives (like FastCDC).
Hi, can you elaborate more on those two points? (Specially, what makes the index format so bad?) Or link to somewhere I can learn more
Have you opened issues with suggested algo improvements? They might be open to them.
Even if restic isn't interested, maybe the rustic dev will be.
Since I'm a big user of proxmox and all my systems are debian-based I recently began to use proxmox backup server also for my physical machines! It's quite fast, supports defuplication and I can donwload or mount backup archives. It sadly lacks a good ux, but I'm still evaulating it because pbs is a tool that I'm already using heavily, so I don't mind reducing the amount of individual software needed to carry on my work.
Try BackRest if you want a nice frontend to Restic. You can configure Restic from the command line but it's pretty awkward. BackRest has a nice simple web GUI and makes basic automation very easy. https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
I'm surprised no one is selling Restic hosting as a straight up service. BackBlaze works well with Restic but the configuration is a little manual and clumsy. A packaged solution would be a nice thing.
Restic is very very good. My only nervousness is the backup format is so opaque, you need a working copy of Restic to restore from it. The format is documented though and of course the code is open source, so I think it's probably fine in practice.
Despite the name Borgbase [0] offers Restic hosting, with actual documentation on how to set it up. Hetzner [1] also offers Restic
[0] https://www.borgbase.com/ [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
Other popular choices include borg, duplicity, and duplicati.
After evaluating these and others mentioned in the comments, I ended up using borg with borgmatic to define homelab backups with yaml files that are version controlled in gitea and deployed using ansible.
I also use duplicity to back up my sister in laws storefront website to backblaze. I've been quite happy with both.
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
http://duplicity.gitlab.io/
https://docs.duplicati.com/en/latest/
I'd throw in kopia[0], fast, many features and easy to use across platforms.
[0] https://kopia.io/
I have seen Kopia mentioned from time to time but never as often as borg. Does it have a good reputation?
I've been using it for years with zero problems.
I chose restic because borg was slow, buggy and an unwieldy pile of Python, not the best language for deployment on heterogeneous Linux systems.
Restic on the other hand is slow, but never crashed on me and is distributed as a single binary.
The only thing I dislike about restic is that it does not have a simple config file where you define your backup settings. Instead I had to write my own backup.sh that I deploy everywhere on my personal and production machines. Paired with rsync.net for storage and healthchecks.io for notifications.
I've never had any crashing or big issues with borg, and it's generally considered to be faster than restic. I'm sure there are more recent benchmarks, but as of Dec 2022, borg wins by a fair bit [1].
For installation, I set up a dedicated virtualenv for borg and borgmatic installation then symlink into /usr/local/bin. This is also automated with ansible and has worked on every distro and version I've used. The latest version does require python 3.9.0, but that's already 4 years old.
1. https://github.com/borgbase/benchmarks
I write Python day to day, but even I use Restic for the single binary. I take a lot of comfort in being able to keep the backup executable adjacent to the backup blobs. While I believe Borg now has a distributable binary, Go has it in its blood to make easy deployment without tricks.
Honest question, but do you not consider environment variables to be a form of simple config?
https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/040_backup.html#envi...
Use resticprofile or autorestic for configuration file or to run scheduled jobs.
Keeping with the name scheme, there is also duplicacy - https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
Duplicity is solid, I’ve been using it since over a decade, and it’s a standard package on Debian-based distributions. Never had any hiccups (and I run regular backup validations).
These threads about backup tools come up regularly, and I always wonder if I’m missing something important about the other tools.
I used Duplicity (via the Gnome Déjà Dup GUI) for years, but Borg turned out to be a lot faster at making the backups, at least for my laptop home dir backups. Like an order of magnitude faster. I don't think I ever tried to hand-configure Duplicity, though.
& Arq
https://www.arqbackup.com/
I have tested all of these also, and settled on borg + borgmatic. It has been absolutely rock solid. Borgmatic just rounds everything together in such a nice way. The documentation is great.
I'm pushing it all to a Hetzner storage box, as well as a local NAS. Super affordable!
BorgBackup is also my choice. More features, but that's not necessarily a good (or bad) thing if Restic does everything you need.
The Borg site says Windows support is "experimental, no binaries yet". Is that still true?
I wish backup program sites would provide an easy upfront capability statement that includes:
- types of backups supported (volume, fileset, ...)
- differciality support (incremental, resumable, dedup, ...)
- support for (always) open file bakup
- filetype/ path restrictions (very large files, max pathlenght, ...)
- restore options ( bare metal, selective, backup mountable as volume, ...)
This would make it far easier to see if it ia worth checking out
Big fan of restic! The only feature I found missing was the ability to browse historical snapshots like regular files.
I wrote and now use the rsync-based, browsable, incremental backup CLI: https://rincr.com/
What do you mean by that? "restic mount" has been part of restic since the very start.
That command works well and accomplishes some of what rincr what built to solve. For example, when I mention browse-ability, I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers.
I also needed both "pull" (backup remote files) and "push" (backup local files) backup features and if I'm not mistaken restic still only supports the "push" model.
EDIT: Added more details
If you're doing pull to prevent remotes from destroying old backups (in case of malware takeover, etc), this can be solved by running rest-server with --append-only
https://github.com/restic/rest-server
It 403's any attempt to overwrite or delete old data.
> I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers.
This means the backups are not encrypted though, and is something you really have to think twice before requiring
> "pull" (backup remote files)
You can mount the server to backup on the backup host, or you can ssh from the backup host to the server to backup, call `tar cf - /folder`, and ingest that from stdin on the backup host. Both will retransmit the totality of the files to backup
Browsing without dependencies is a bit tricky due to a) deduplication, b) encryption and c) compression of restic's backups.
Restic has a mount subcommand that exposes all backups through a FUSE filesystem, no?
Only feature missing for me was passwordless backups
Isn't that the purpose of `restic mount`?
Restic is great! It has worked flawlessly for me for several years.
Anyone knows if there is plan to add Reed Solomon erasure coding, just in case there will be errors in repository? Something like Par2.
Asymmetric encryption could also be useful in some situations. Perhaps they could just use Age for the asymmetric encryption backend (unfortunately Age offers only 128 bits of security in its symmetric encryption, so it’s not recommended for long term storage, because of the save-now decrypt-later attack). But I expect a stable quantum resistant plug-in appearing next year or so.
Afaik not yet, there was some discussion here: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804
Which one is more resistant to bitrot, Restic or Borg Backup?
(Yes, bitrot might better be mitigated at the filesystem layer, but I'm not switching to ZFS, btrfs or bcache-fs anytime soon.)
Not sure but I know that Vorta (borg GUI) does automatic consistency checking using `borg check ` regularly.
One thing that I like about Restic is that you can automatically do a test restore of a subset (e.g. 1%, 5%, 8%) of your data, so that you can check for problems on the remote automatically.
I have used restic for a year now. I’ve thought about it twice. 9/10 would backup again.
I've used restic for five years (and also Borg is equally good), similarly very much recommended:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
I built a tool on top of restic to host git repositories on untrusted infrastructure. Its been working fine for my small low traffic projects for years, I only sync the fork every few months. https://github.com/CGamesPlay/git-remote-restic
I've been using Restic for servers, but ended up going with Kopia for machines that are not always on, like laptops. It has the advantage that it will take something of an opportunistic approach where it will start backing up if it hasn't done so in a while, and seems to be able to restart with aplomb if it gets interrupted (machine shutdown or laptop lid closed).
That and being able to have multiple machines writing to a shared repository at the same time is handy. I have the kids' Windows computers both backing up to the same repo to save a bit of storage. (Now if only Kopia supported VSS on Windows without mucking around with dubious scripts.)
I think the first part could be solved by systemd timers, no?
Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it compare to:
- Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs
- Kopia https://kopia.io
I perused the Rustic website and they have a direct comparison of Restic here: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.htm. At face value I thought it was just, "because it's Rust," but it does appear to have a few additional features.
I haven't used either, though.
Rustic was started by a former restic contributor. My impression at the time was that he was frustrated with poor collaboration from restic maintainers (slow/no response to his PRs). So it's a bit more than just "rewrite-it-in-rust".
Many of his rejected/ignored restic PRs ended up being features in rustic: cold storage support, config file support, resumable operations, webdav server, etc.
"rewrite-it-in-rust-wrapping-c"
You dropped the l: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
Rustic is a rewrite of Restic from Go to Rust. See https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
It looks nice, but until they support FUSE mounting, I'll stick with restic.
I switched to rustic a couple of months ago due to it being able to filter based on .gitignore files. Have done a few test restores and everything has worked well so far
A killer feature rustic has over restic is built-in support for .gitignore files. So all your dependencies and build output is automatically ignored in your backups.
At first I thought that sounded great, but then I realized that that would exclude files that I want to be backed up, like `dir-locals-2.el`, which should be excluded from git, but should also be backed up. There doesn't seem to be a great solution to that in general.
Nice. Using `.gitignore` would simplify my Restic, Borg/Borgmatic, and Rsync-based backup scripts/configs. (Right now, I end up duplicating the same information in a few places, not very well.)
https://www.patpro.net/blog/index.php/2024/03/07/3590-borg-k...
I vaguely remember Kopia having partly mitigated Restic's issues with memory usage.
Faster alternatives I recommend:
* Kopia: many features, also great for desktop GUI users
* bupstash: The fastest, lowest RAM. I use it to backup 1B files daily (200TB). Ransomware-proof asymmetric multi key crypto. Less features.
bupstash is new to me. That looks like a cool set of properties. I do wish it supported S3 and compatible APIs as a backup target.
Relevant: Borg 2.x now supports rclone to allow S3-compatible hosts.
Restic is awesome for moderate operational scale, but when it's got to backup thousands of storage block devices with arbitrary number of files on them, it just doesn't really work.
Is there anything cool people use for Ceph-RBD backups nowadays?
For now, the only thing in the OSS world that doesn't choke at this scale is Benji, but it looks like it's not really maintained anymore, and I worry it may not support newer Ceph versions.
There is also autorestic - A simplified YAML-based configuration for dealing with Restic backups: https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic
I hadn’t seen autorestic before so I can’t compare them, but there’s resticprofile
My Thinkpad has a tiny SDHC slot. I put a 1 terabyte SDHC card in it (~$80) and have a cron job take hourly Restic snapshots of my primary storage. It's been reliable and has bailed me out more than once.
Make sure to verify it against bitrot. SD cards aren't the most reliable media.
Duplicity is my go because it integrates so well with pgp signing/encryption. Other popular alternatives like borg and restic just do not have it.
I do wish there were a way to allow a machine to perform backups without also allowing to read them. I generate per-machine secret keys for restic, then encrypt those keys to a set of GPG recipients, and store them alongside the backup data. I did have to roll my own solution for this using s3cmd etc but its not too bad.
Restic 0.17.1 was released last month. The home page says "During initial development (versions prior to 1.0.0), maintainers and developers will do their utmost to keep backwards compatibility and stability, although there might be breaking changes without increasing the major version."
So worth a peek but still under construction.
Discussion of my approach to using restic + rclone + Backblaze B2 here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041056
I’m more fan of BorgBackup, but you have to couple it with I.e. rclone for it to make backups to cloud object storage. But that opinion is based on my particular use case, probably would be using restic if direct to cloud was a better choice.
Borg 2.0 supposedly will support cloud backups out of the box.
Related:
Restic 0.17.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082937 - July 2024 (5 comments)
Restic – Simple Backups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915291 - Jan 2024 (14 comments)
Restic 0.15.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364925 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Restic 0.14.0 Released (with highly anticipated feature – compression) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599032 - Aug 2022 (5 comments)
Restic 0.13.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822631 - March 2022 (66 comments)
Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209455 - Nov 2021 (286 comments)
Saving a restic backup the hard way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438430 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)
Restic Cryptography (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471549 - June 2021 (5 comments)
Restic – Backups Done Right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410833 - Oct 2019 (177 comments)
Show HN: K8up – Kubernetes Backup Operator Based on Restic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769362 - Aug 2019 (18 comments)
Append-only backups with restic and rclone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347188 - March 2019 (42 comments)
Restic Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131310 - Aug 2017 (36 comments)
Restic – Backups done right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135430 - Aug 2015 (1 comment)
Interesting, I'll give this a try. I'm hoping one day to retire my subscription/cloud-based back-ups with something docker based that still back-ups to multiple instances (local and remote).
I've tried many options and ended up distching Restic for Borg and then Borg for Kopia, which was IMO the best option.
Awesome, I’m using BackInTime right now for ’snapshot’-like backups but I’m always interested in new solutions
first time I heard of this was yesterday, in a thecatch2024 CTF. Today, on HN... https://www.thecatch.cz/
https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic
i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups like in duplicity
What do you miss about it? In restic, every snapshot has the speed and size of an incremental backup, but the functionality of a full backup.
sometimes you just must have a new full backup every N days/weeks. it a more "smooth" way to deal with potential corruption in repo that might be undetected (without dealing with all suggested workarounds) and in some cases compliance/certification requires it
Backrest is great. It makes it very easy to configure restic backups and do the restores.
What's the best way to backup a managed Postgres from DO to another cloud?
Not sure what DO managed PostgreSQL supports, but PostgreSQL streaming replication would seem like the natural way to go.
They don't support that, forgot to clarify that in my comment. Thanks!
Pruning takes forever in Restic, which is why we migrated away from it.
What did you migrate to?
Rustic is better