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Restic Design Principles

Restic is a program that does backups right and was designed with the following principles in mind:

  • Easy: Doing backups should be a frictionless process, otherwise you might be tempted to skip it. Restic should be easy to configure and use, so that, in the 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 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 back end to save precious backup space.

Build restic

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>
[...]

More documentation can be found on the website, especially in the user manual.

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. This goes for all released versions of restic, this may not be the case for the master branch.

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.

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 the back end is contained in doc/Design.md. The development environment is described in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contact

If you discover a bug, find something surprising or if you would like to discuss or ask something, please open a github issue. If you would like to chat about restic, there is also the IRC channel #restic on irc.freenode.net.

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 the following PGP key (0x91A6868BD3F7A907):

pub   4096R/91A6868BD3F7A907 2014-11-01
      Key fingerprint = CF8F 18F2 8445 7597 3F79  D4E1 91A6 868B D3F7 A907
      uid                          Alexander Neumann <alexander@bumpern.de>
      uid                          Alexander Neumann <alexander@debian.org>
      sub   4096R/D5FC2ACF4043FDF1 2014-11-01

Talks

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

License

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