restic : Powerful Cross-Platform CLI Backup Utility

Every year on the 31st of March, we celebrate the World Backup Day. This is done right before the April Fool’s Day to focus on the fact that if we do not backup our data, we might end up losing all of our important files and look like a big fool.

If you do not want to lose your data, you should make a habit of keeping regular backups of all the important files. There are many backup tools available today – some of them are free and some are commercial, some of them have a convenient GUI while others offer a command line interface (CLI).

restic is one of such CLI based backup tools that is both powerful and fast. It offers features such as encryption and remote backups over SFTP, cloud storage and more. For all these features, you need just one binary file (EXE) that can be run from anywhere including from a portable hard drive.

restic : Powerful Backup Tool

For starters, you have to create a repository which is the folder where the backup is placed. In order to create a repository, you can give a command: restic init –repo d:\restic\foo where the last part d:\restic\foo is the folder for backups.

restic : Powerful Backup Tool

Once you have created a repository, you can backup a folder or file to this repository and create snapshots. Snapshots are backups that reside inside a repository and have a unique ID. For example, you can backup a folder d:\PIX inside the repository D:\restic\foo using: restic –repo d:\restic\foo backup d:\PIX

restic : Powerful Backup Tool

Before you can restore from a backup snapshot, you have to know its ID. This can be done by listing all the snapshots stored inside a repository using a simple command like: restic snapshots –repo d:\restic\foo

restic : Powerful Backup Tool

You should note down the backup snapshot ID for restoring from this backup. After this a restic command can be used to restore files from this backup to another folder in this manner: restic –repo d:\restic\foo restore 6x002cde –target d:\PIX where the target folder is given in the end.

restic : Powerful Backup Tool

restic provides an online documentation with all the details and examples which make it very easy for anyone to work with restic. In addition, restic also comes with a simple manual that can be viewed using a command restic –help or simply restic.

restic is not really for the people who are looking for the comfort of the GUI based backup software. But it provides great functionality and features that can be used from batch scripts or through Windows task scheduler. It is very fast both when backing up and restoring the data. We found it easy-to-use and very light on system resourced when used on a Windows 10 PC.

You can download restic backup utility from https://restic.net/.