WARNING

WARNING: At the moment, consider restic as alpha quality software, it is not yet finished. Do not use it for real data!

Restic

Restic is a program that does backups right. The design goals are:

• 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.

• 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.

• Verifiable: Much more important than backup is restore, so restic enables you to easily verify that all data can be restored.

• 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.

• 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.

Building

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:

Contribute and Documentation

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.

Development

For development, please have a look at CONTRIBUTING.md, especially the section "Development Environment". If you have any questions, please get in touch!

Contact

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).

Talks

The following talks will be or have been given about restic:

• 2015-08-23: A Solution to the Backup Inconvenience: Lecture at FROSCON 2015 in Bonn, Germany
• 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)

License

Restic is licensed under "BSD 2-Clause License". You can find the complete text in the file LICENSE.