Restic: Backups done right

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/

Keeping with the name scheme, there is also duplicacy - https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy

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.

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.

The Borg site says Windows support is "experimental, no binaries yet". Is that still true?

I have seen Kopia mentioned from time to time but never as often as borg. Does it have a good reputation?

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.

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 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.

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've been using it for years with zero problems.

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/

It's not as old, but has a Gui and is native on Linux/Windows/Macos.

Last time I tried Kopia was more like "select ONE folder to backup and add ONE destination to SNAPSHOT it to". While it is very simplistic and would be lovely in many use cases - for a home/personal backup which often requires granularity of inclusion and exclusion it just didn't make any sense. I am not sure whether that has changed.

> it does not have a simple config file where you define your backup settings.

Will this https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/discussions/188 work for you?

Also, I can add directory file to include exclude directly to this config or to separate files as I please and just refer in this config.

Agreed on no crashing/issues. I always use the provided Borg "single binary" https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.htm... that unpacks everything into /tmp and naturally is larger than the restic binary. That isn't an issue on my systems.

Restic has no unencrypted mode for reasons - you must use an empty password and additional flag instead. If your backups will already be encrypted in other ways you'll still pay encryption overhead.

Arq is awesome! Unfortunately not suitable for headless systems.

Kopia allows to specify quite different snapshot configurations with patterns etc. I converted old snapshot since 2005 backwards into the same dedup mounted on diverse paths, so I wonder what would be missing.

Something like this https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/040_backup.html#incl... is missing. Or let's say something like Borg's PATH arg.

i.e multiple files/sources to be backed up to one destination/sink in one go. Not one by one in different snapshots.

Same, borgmatic has been running flawlessly for a long time, it’s great.

Also backing up to a Hetzner storagebox, so it’s quite cheap too.

https://torsion.org/borgmatic/