WARNING: At the moment, consider restic as alpha quality software, it is not yet finished. Do not use it for real data!
Restic is a program that does backups right. The design goals are:
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Easy: Doing backups should be a frictionless process, otherwise you are tempted to skip it. Restic should be easy to configure and use, so that in the unlikely event of a data loss you can just restore it. Likewise, restoring data should not be complicated.
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Fast: Backing up your data with restic should only be limited by your network or harddisk bandwidth so that you can backup your files every day. Nobody does backups if it takes too much time. Restoring backups should only transfer data that is needed for the files that are to be restored, so that this process is also fast.
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Verifiable: Much more important than backup is restore, so restic enables you to easily verify that all data can be restored.
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Secure: Restic uses cryptography to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of your data. The location the backup data is stored is assumed not to be a trusted environment (e.g. a shared space where others like system administrators are able to access your backups). Restic is built to secure your data against such attackers.
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Efficient: With the growth of data, additional snapshots should only take the storage of the actual increment. Even more, duplicate data should be de-duplicated before it is actually written to the storage backend to save precious backup space.
Install Go/Golang (at least version 1.3), then run go run build.go,
afterwards you'll find the binary in the current directory:
$ go run build.go
$ ./restic --help
Usage:
restic [OPTIONS] <command>
Application Options:
-r, --repo= Repository directory to backup to/restore from
Help Options:
-h, --help Show this help message
Available commands:
backup save file/directory
cache manage cache
cat dump something
check check the repository
find find a file/directory
init create repository
key manage keys
list lists data
ls list files
restore restore a snapshot
snapshots show snapshots
unlock remove locks
version display version
A short demo recording can be found here:
Contributions are welcome! More information can be found in
CONTRIBUTING.md. A document describing the design of
restic and the data structures stored on disc is contained in
doc/Design.md.
For development, please have a look at CONTRIBUTING.md,
especially the section "Development Environment". If you have any questions,
please get in touch!
If you discover a bug or find something surprising, please feel free to open a github issue. If you would like to chat about restic, there is also the IRC channel #restic on irc.freenode.net. Or just write me an email :)
Important: If you discover something that you believe to be a possible critical security problem, please do not open a GitHub issue but send an email directly to alexander@bumpern.de. If possible, please encrypt your email using PGP (0xD3F7A907).
The following talks have been given about restic:
- 2015-02-01: Lightning Talk at FOSDEM 2015: A short introduction (with slightly outdated command line)
- 2015-01-27: Talk about restic at CCC Aachen (in German)
Restic is licensed under "BSD 2-Clause License". You can find the complete text
in the file LICENSE.