Restic
I’ve been using ZFS for a very long time and it still is my go-to solution for having incremental backups(snapshots) easy transferred using ZFS-{send,receive} and of course most important a sound and safe storage for my dear bytes.
I have now come to a scenario in which I can’t have ZFS at the receiving end and that made me look for filesystem agnostic snapshot solutions and there seems to be quite a few out there. After done some digging I decided to try out the tool named restic, which is a small application written in golang that ticks the following boxes for me;
- Clear purpose - does one thing and does it well!
- Commandline - easy to integrate in existing scripts
- Deduplication
- Encryption
Restic is also available in almost every possible system I can see myself using and best of all it allows me to keep the data away from prying eyes while keeping the process as a whole quite simple and intuitive.
Restic has now been running for about a month or so without any hickups and it all seems to be working fine. One thing I also like is that you can route snapshots from different machines into the same repository and not only that, you can also tag them individually making them easy addressable for extracting/pruning the repository.