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 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.

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