Restic: Backups done right

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment on Restic

  • Many commenters report years of trouble‑free use and successful restores; considered “very good” for personal and small/medium server setups.
  • Some are uneasy that the backup format is opaque and requires Restic to restore, but note that it’s documented and open source.

Configuration, UX, and Tooling

  • Core CLI is seen as powerful but awkward to configure; no built‑in config file format.
  • Environment variables help, but several people use wrapper tools: Backrest (web GUI), autorestic, resticprofile, custom scripts.
  • FUSE mounting via restic mount is highlighted as a key feature for browsing backups, though some prefer browsable, unencrypted rsync‑style trees.

Performance and Scalability

  • Restic is often described as “slow,” especially for pruning and for large repositories.
  • Criticism focuses on the index format and use of Rabin fingerprinting; some suggest newer chunking algorithms.
  • Reported to work well at moderate scale, but not for massive environments (e.g., thousands of Ceph RBD volumes).

Feature Gaps and Desired Improvements

  • Lacks explicit full vs incremental scheduling; some want periodic fulls for corruption risk management and compliance.
  • Requests for Reed–Solomon/erasure coding, asymmetric encryption, and passwordless backups.
  • No native “pull” backup model; workarounds involve rest-server append-only mode or SSH/tar pipelines.

Comparisons with Alternatives

  • Borg: widely praised, often faster but more complex; Python stack vs Restic’s single binary. Borgmatic and Vorta are popular wrappers.
  • Rustic: Rust rewrite with extra features (.gitignore support, config files, resumable operations, cold storage, WebDAV), but still beta and missing FUSE.
  • Kopia: frequently recommended as faster, with good cross‑platform GUI and opportunistic laptop backups; supports multiple machines per repo.
  • Other tools mentioned: duplicity, duplicati, duplicacy, bupstash (very fast/low RAM, fewer features), rsnapshot (simple, transparent hard‑link snapshots), Proxmox Backup Server, Arq.

Storage Backends and Hosting

  • Common backends: Backblaze B2 (often via rclone), Hetzner Storage Box, rsync.net.
  • Borgbase and Hetzner are noted as offering explicit Restic support/hosting.