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Admin

I’ve recently moved my home backups over to restic . I’m using restic to backup the /etc and /home folders and on all machines are my website files and databases. Media files are backed up separately.

I have around 220 Gigabytes of data, about half of that is photos.

My Home setup

I currently have 4 regularly-used physical machines at home: two desktops, one laptop and server. I also have a VPS hosted at Linode and a VM running on the home server. Everything is running Linux.

Existing Backup Setup

For at least 15 years I’ve been using rsnaphot for backup. rsnapshot works by keeping a local copy of the folders to be backed up. To update the local copy it uses rsync over ssh to pull down a copy from the remote machine. It then keeps multiple old versions of files by making a series of copies.

I’d end up with around 12 older versions of the filesystem (something like 5 daily, 4 weekly and 3 monthly) so I could recover files that had been deleted. To save space rsnapshot uses hard links so only one copy of a file is kept if the contents didn’t change.

I also backed up a copy to external hard drives regularly and kept one copy offsite.

The main problem with rsnapshot was it was a little clunky. It took a long time to run because it copied and deleted a lot of files every time it ran. It also is difficult to exclude folders from being backed up and it is also not compatible with any cloud based filesystems. It also requires ssh keys to login to remote machines as root.

Getting started with restic

I started playing around with restic after seeing some recommendations online. As a single binary with a few commands it seemed a little simpler than other solutions. It has a push model so needs to be on each machine and it will upload from there to the archive.

Restic supports around a dozen storage backends for repositories. These include local file system, sftp and...