What it is
restic is a backup program. It saves snapshots of your files into a repository on a local disk, an SFTP server or a cloud storage service. Every snapshot is encrypted, and data that hasn’t changed since the last one is stored only once, so frequent backups stay small and quick.
Why it’s here
- Encrypted by default. A repository can’t be read without its passphrase, wherever it’s stored.
- Small and fast. Deduplication means each daily backup only uploads what changed.
- Reaches almost anywhere. Through rclone it can back up to dozens of storage services, including Nextcloud.
On CoreDesktop
restic runs CoreDesktop’s daily backups of your home folder to your Nextcloud files, once you run configure backup. How they work, what’s left out and how long backups are kept is on the Utilities page. To look at your backups or get files back:
source ~/.local/share/coredesktop/system/backup-env.sh
restic snapshots
See restoring from a backup for the rest. restic is installed from pacman, and update keeps it current.