Cloud backup with restic

Yes, I’ve tried multiple approaches in the past to get an offsite-backup up and running. I’ve used rsync first and then obnam and duplicity with encryption. Both successful with remote ssh-hosts.

But times are changing and I wanted to use a cloud-storage provider now instead of a dedicated remote host for my backups – so I started with duplicity/duply to get AWS S3 access running – that worked quite good.

But for some reason I discovered restic on github and gave it a try (maybe because of this introduction)

Things I like:

• growing user base on GitHub
• its encrypted (very interesting read on this)
• uses deduplication
• usage is straightforward, no hard to read config-files with dozens of options
• no full-/incremental backups, every backup is a “snapshot”
• they’re promise to not change the repository format in the future
• access to cloud providers (tested AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage) went very easy
• its using a local cache to speed up (but is not sticked to that)
• you could move the backups to different locations using standard tools and they’re still usable
• local backups (like on USB-drives) could be achieved the same way: every destination is considered as “remote” and is encrypted

Documentation is good, so I won’t share usage details here. But I’ve started backups to Google Cloud Storage last week and it feels great…