Restic – Simple Backups | Hacker News Reader

Restic – Simple Backups

github.com

34 pointsklaussilveira14 comments

Kopia is a wonderful alternative written in Go that has a great cli and gui to boot.

My recommendation would be Duplicacy [0]. Code is also on GitHub [1].

It has a paid GUI version, $20 for the first year and $5 for subsequent years with discounts for multiple machines [2]. At least once they've run a promotion for a very cheap lifetime license.

Use it just from the CLI is free.

My setup is pretty simple, Syncthing and Duplicacy (GUI version) run in a docker container on my home server. Everything gets sync'd to the server and then Duplicacy backs it up hourly to a Hetzner Storage Box and BackBlaze B2.

The deduplication is a huge data saver on the cloud storage especially for pictures or videos that may be on multiple computers and different syncthing folders.

[0] https://duplicacy.com/ [1] https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy [2] https://duplicacy.com/buy.html

I've been using restic to backup servers and my workstation (stored on rsync.net servers). There's a lot of recommendation around for borgbackup, which I found incredibly slow and buggy. The fact that it's a Python package doesn't help.

restic on the other hard is still incredibly slow, but ships as a single binary, and has served me well — during backups as well as restores.

I just wish backup tools shipped with standard systemd units, instead of having to copy, customize and stick into cron my hand-made /usr/local/bin/backup.sh script. Thank God for healthchecks.io that lets me know if backups stop working before it's too late.

(Not affiliated with any of these services, just a happy user)

> restic on the other hard is still incredibly slow

Restic's performance to scan the local disk depends on the target you are storing the backup at. I switched recently from a local NAS server to AWS. Before that change scaning 300 GiB of data took 1 min, now it takes more than an hour.

Restic is great. Never failed me.

I think it could be included in default in Linux distributions. Perhaps it could be integrated into Deja dup (default , not experimental) and gnome. A GUI for restic in gnome!

I use restic daily to s3 and local.

I use bash scripts and have a ntfy.sh update if it fails.

Recommend it. Main issue with borg was a gigantic cache.

Just out of curiosity: What backup tool do you use?

FWIW, restic works well on NixOS.

Since this is HN, we also need to mention [Rustic](https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic) which is better since it's in Rust.

It's better because it supports append only and is declarative.

You can achieve append only with restic with S3, proper access rules and lifecycle policies

Is there some writeup how to achieve that?

I found [0] for restic + rclone.

I personally use this Ansible role [1] to deploy restic and then just configure my buckets with the ACLs described in the README and a lifecycle policy so that an override of a file creates a new version instead. Currently I have it so old versions expire on their own, and no one except the account admin can delete them.

[0] https://ruderich.org/simon/notes/append-only-backups-with-re... [1] https://gitlab.com/byh0ki-org/infra/ansible/roles/restic/

Funny but serious q: anyone used this as drop in replacement? Who wouldn’t want to use less memory and get faster backups??

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