[HN Gopher] Restic: Backups done right
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Restic: Backups done right
Author : fanf2
Score : 108 points
Date : 2024-10-13 17:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (restic.net)
| andarp wrote:
| I have used restic for a year now. I've thought about it twice.
| 9/10 would backup again.
| stavros wrote:
| 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/
| tguvot wrote:
| https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic
|
| i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups
| like in duplicity
| kam wrote:
| 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.
| tguvot wrote:
| 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
| Jnr wrote:
| Backrest is great. It makes it very easy to configure restic
| backups and do the restores.
| yapyap wrote:
| Awesome, I'm using BackInTime right now for 'snapshot'-like
| backups but I'm always interested in new solutions
| alibert wrote:
| Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it
| compare to:
|
| - Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs
|
| - Kopia https://kopia.io
| asteroidburger wrote:
| Rustic is a rewrite of Restic from Go to Rust. See
| https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-restic.html
| aliasxneo wrote:
| 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.
| dicytea wrote:
| You dropped the l: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/comparison-
| restic.html
| tredre3 wrote:
| 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.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| I vaguely remember Kopia having partly mitigated Restic's
| issues with memory usage.
| riedel wrote:
| https://www.patpro.net/blog/index.php/2024/03/07/3590-borg-k...
| Scandiravian wrote:
| 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
| snorremd wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| Jur wrote:
| 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).
| gmuslera wrote:
| 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.
| pdw wrote:
| Borg 2.0 supposedly will support cloud backups out of the box.
| kayson wrote:
| 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/
| riedel wrote:
| I'd throw in kopia[0], fast, many features and easy to use
| across platforms.
|
| [0] https://kopia.io/
| mongol wrote:
| I have seen Kopia mentioned from time to time but never as
| often as borg. Does it have a good reputation?
| leetnewb wrote:
| Keeping with the name scheme, there is also duplicacy -
| https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
| pixard wrote:
| 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!
| mikae1 wrote:
| BorgBackup is also my choice. More features, but that's not
| necessarily a good (or bad) thing if Restic does everything you
| need.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| ray_v wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| abhinavk wrote:
| Use resticprofile or autorestic for configuration file or to
| run scheduled jobs.
| notherhack wrote:
| The Borg site says Windows support is "experimental, no
| binaries yet". Is that still true?
| dmw_ng wrote:
| 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
| SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote:
| I've tried many options and ended up distching Restic for Borg
| and then Borg for Kopia, which was IMO the best option.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| There is also autorestic - A simplified YAML-based configuration
| for dealing with Restic backups:
| https://github.com/cupcakearmy/autorestic
| justusthane wrote:
| I hadn't seen autorestic before so I can't compare them, but
| there's resticprofile
| slig wrote:
| What's the best way to backup a managed Postgres from DO to
| another cloud?
| fmajid wrote:
| Not sure what DO managed PostgreSQL supports, but PostgreSQL
| streaming replication would seem like the natural way to go.
| slig wrote:
| They don't support that, forgot to clarify that in my
| comment. Thanks!
| chrchr wrote:
| 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.
| thekashifmalik wrote:
| 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/
| demomode wrote:
| Isn't that the purpose of `restic mount`?
| dmd wrote:
| What do you mean by that? "restic mount" has been part of
| restic since the very start.
| thekashifmalik wrote:
| 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
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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.
| luoc wrote:
| Browsing without dependencies is a bit tricky due to a)
| deduplication, b) encryption and c) compression of restic's
| backups.
| heinrichf wrote:
| Restic has a mount subcommand that exposes all backups through
| a FUSE filesystem, no?
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| aborsy wrote:
| 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.
| seqizz wrote:
| Afaik not yet, there was some discussion here:
| https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/804
| npace12 wrote:
| first time I heard of this was yesterday, in a thecatch2024 CTF.
| Today, on HN... https://www.thecatch.cz/
| cvalka wrote:
| Rustic is better
| notherhack wrote:
| 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.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
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