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Restic Backup I — Simple and beautiful backups
TL;DR
This blog post is the first of four posts about restic, a simple, beautiful, and extremely versatile file backup solution written in Go. It is very easy to install and configure and just works pretty neat out of the box. Even though restic backup is not for everyone, I quickly fell in love with its simplicity and enjoy the peace of mind it gives me when using it for backing up my Linux servers.
The restic blog post series
Restic Backup I — Simple and beautiful backups (this post)
Restic Backup II — In action
Restic Backup III — How to set up
Restic Backup IV — Real-life examples
Introduction
Restic is a very simple and powerful file-level backup solution that was written in go and is completely open-source. It is available for Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows and can be used with a variety of different storage backends ranging from local storage, to SFTP, REST, S3 as well as Azure blob storage and Google cloud storage. Even though restic is awesome, it is also different from a lot of well-known backup software players such as Veeam, Acronis, or Backup Exec. To see the excellence of restic I find it important to emphasize what it is and even more important what it is not. Therefore, I think it is important to mention that restic might not be the right tool for everyone.
Restic is not …
(The following are my opinions and not final facts!)
… a centrally managed backup solution to backup VMs on storage appliance level. If you need the ability to restore single VMs or systems that consist of multiple VMs take a look at Veeam or Rubrik.
Restic is not a backup software that is able to create system images that can be restored to new hardware. If you need this, use Acronis True Image.
Restic is not a backup software providing a GUI. I know there are already attempts by restatic to do so, but it doesn’t seem as at the point of writing there is anything ready to use for production. If you are a normal end-user that does not know how to use the command line, it might not be…
