Restic: Backups done right

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/

Isn't that the purpose of `restic mount`?

What do you mean by that? "restic mount" has been part of restic since the very start.

Restic has a mount subcommand that exposes all backups through a FUSE filesystem, no?

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

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.

Browsing without dependencies is a bit tricky due to a) deduplication, b) encryption and c) compression of restic's backups.

> I mean on the backup host without any dependencies so I can use standard file tools and browsers.

This means the backups are not encrypted though, and is something you really have to think twice before requiring

> "pull" (backup remote files)

You can mount the server to backup on the backup host, or you can ssh from the backup host to the server to backup, call `tar cf - /folder`, and ingest that from stdin on the backup host. Both will retransmit the totality of the files to backup

Only feature missing for me was passwordless backups