Introduction

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 hard disk 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 where the backup data is stored is assumed to be an untrusted 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, by encrypting it with AES-256 in counter mode and authenticating it using Poly1305-AES.

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.

Free: restic is free software and licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License and actively developed on GitHub.

Quickstart

A short recorded demo of restic:

To learn more about restic, checkout the user manual:

Installation

To install, please follow the Installation Instructions Page in the manual or download the latest native binary on the GitHub Download Page.

Compatibility

Backward compatibility for backups is important so that our users are always able to restore saved data. Therefore restic follows Semantic Versioning to clearly define which versions are compatible. The repository and data structures contained therein are considered the “Public API” in the sense of Semantic Versioning.

We guarantee backward compatibility of all repositories within one major version; as long as we do not increment the major version, data can be read and restored. We strive to be fully backward compatible to all prior versions.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! More information can be found in the restic contribution guidelines. A document describing the design of restic and the data structures stored on disc is contained in the design document.

There are several ways to contact the restic project and its community:

If you have usage questions or problems in general, please post in the forum .

or in general, please post in the . If you discover a bug or have a feature suggestion, feel free to open a GitHub issue . Please make sure to fill out the issue template you are presented with when doing so.

or have a suggestion, feel free to open a . Please make sure to fill out the issue template you are presented with when doing so. If you would like to chat about restic with other users there is also the IRC channel #restic on irc.freenode.net , which you can access through your browser if you don’t have an IRC client installed.

about restic with other users there is also the IRC channel on , which you can access through your browser if you don’t have an IRC client installed. For other project related inquiries (not support requests), feel free to just write an e-mail to alexander@bumpern.de :)

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 have been given about restic:

Blog

For more information regarding restic development, have a look at our blog. The latest posts are:

License