29 KiB
Thanks for using restic. This document will give you an overview of the basic functionality provided by restic.
Installing restic
from pre-compiled binary
You can download the latest pre-compiled binary from the restic release page.
Mac OS X
If you are using Mac OS X, you can install restic using the homebrew packet manager:
$ brew tap restic/restic
$ brew install restic
archlinux
On archlinux, there is a package called restic-git
which can be installed from AUR, e.g. with pacaur
:
$ pacaur -S restic-git
Building restic
restic is written in the Go programming language and you need at least Go version 1.6. Building restic may also work with older versions of Go, but that's not supported. See the Getting started guide of the Go project for instructions how to install Go.
In order to build restic from source, execute the following steps:
$ git clone https://github.com/restic/restic
[...]
$ cd restic
$ go run build.go
At the moment, the only tested compiler for restic is the official Go compiler. Building restic with gccgo may work, but is not supported.
Usage help
Usage help is available:
$ ./restic --help
restic is a backup program which allows saving multiple revisions of files and
directories in an encrypted repository stored on different backends.
Usage:
restic [command]
Available Commands:
backup create a new backup of files and/or directories
cat print internal objects to stdout
check check the repository for errors
find find a file or directory
forget forget removes snapshots from the repository
init initialize a new repository
key manage keys (passwords)
list list items in the repository
ls list files in a snapshot
mount mount the repository
prune remove unneeded data from the repository
rebuild-index build a new index file
restore extract the data from a snapshot
snapshots list all snapshots
unlock remove locks other processes created
version Print version information
Flags:
--json set output mode to JSON for commands that support it
--no-lock do not lock the repo, this allows some operations on read-only repos
-p, --password-file string read the repository password from a file
-q, --quiet do not output comprehensive progress report
-r, --repo string repository to backup to or restore from (default: $RESTIC_REPOSITORY)
Use "restic [command] --help" for more information about a command.
Similar to programs such as git
, restic has a number of sub-commands. You can
see these commands in the listing above. Each sub-command may have own
command-line options, and there is a help option for each command which lists
them, e.g. for the backup
command:
$ ./restic backup --help
The "backup" command creates a new snapshot and saves the files and directories
given as the arguments.
Usage:
restic backup [flags] FILE/DIR [FILE/DIR] ...
Flags:
-e, --exclude pattern exclude a pattern (can be specified multiple times)
--exclude-file string read exclude patterns from a file
--files-from string read the files to backup from file (can be combined with file args)
-f, --force force re-reading the target files/directories. Overrides the "parent" flag
-x, --one-file-system Exclude other file systems
--parent string use this parent snapshot (default: last snapshot in the repo that has the same target files/directories)
--stdin read backup from stdin
--stdin-filename string file name to use when reading from stdin
--tag tag add a tag for the new snapshot (can be specified multiple times)
Global Flags:
--json set output mode to JSON for commands that support it
--no-lock do not lock the repo, this allows some operations on read-only repos
-p, --password-file string read the repository password from a file
-q, --quiet do not output comprehensive progress report
-r, --repo string repository to backup to or restore from (default: $RESTIC_REPOSITORY)
Subcommand that support showing progress information such as backup
, check
and prune
will do so unless
the quiet flag -q
or --quiet
is set. When running from a non-interactive console progress reporting will
be limited to once every 10 seconds to not fill your logs.
Additionally on Unix systems if restic
receives a SIGUSR signal the current progress will written to the
standard output so you can check up on the status at will.
Initialize a repository
First, we need to create a "repository". This is the place where your backups will be saved at.
In order to create a repository at /tmp/backup
, run the following command and
enter the same password twice:
$ restic init --repo /tmp/backup
enter password for new backend:
enter password again:
created restic backend 085b3c76b9 at /tmp/backup
Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository.
Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.
Remembering your password is important! If you lose it, you won't be able to access data stored in the repository.
For automated backups, restic accepts the repository location in the
environment variable RESTIC_REPOSITORY
. The password can be read from a file
(via the option --password-file
) or the environment variable
RESTIC_PASSWORD
.
Password prompt on Windows
At the moment, restic only supports the default Windows console interaction.
If you use emulation environments like MSYS2 or
Cygwin, which use terminals like Mintty
or rxvt
,
you may get a password error:
You can workaround this by using a special tool called winpty
(look
here and
here for detail information). On MSYS2,
you can install winpty
as follows:
$ pacman -S winpty
$ winpty restic -r /tmp/backup init
Create a snapshot
Now we're ready to backup some data. The contents of a directory at a specific point in time is called a "snapshot" in restic. Run the following command and enter the repository password you chose above again:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup ~/work
enter password for repository:
scan [/home/user/work]
scanned 764 directories, 1816 files in 0:00
[0:29] 100.00% 54.732 MiB/s 1.582 GiB / 1.582 GiB 2580 / 2580 items 0 errors ETA 0:00
duration: 0:29, 54.47MiB/s
snapshot 40dc1520 saved
As you can see, restic created a backup of the directory and was pretty fast!
The specific snapshot just created is identified by a sequence of hexadecimal
characters, 40dc1520
in this case.
If you run the command again, restic will create another snapshot of your data, but this time it's even faster. This is de-duplication at work!
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup ~/shared/work/web
enter password for repository:
using parent snapshot 40dc1520aa6a07b7b3ae561786770a01951245d2367241e71e9485f18ae8228c
scan [/home/user/work]
scanned 764 directories, 1816 files in 0:00
[0:00] 100.00% 0B/s 1.582 GiB / 1.582 GiB 2580 / 2580 items 0 errors ETA 0:00
duration: 0:00, 6572.38MiB/s
snapshot 79766175 saved
You can even backup individual files in the same repository.
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup ~/work.txt
scan [~/work.txt]
scanned 0 directories, 1 files in 0:00
[0:00] 100.00% 0B/s 220B / 220B 1 / 1 items 0 errors ETA 0:00
duration: 0:00, 0.03MiB/s
snapshot 31f7bd63 saved
In fact several hosts may use the same repository to backup directories and files leading to a greater de-duplication.
You can exclude folders and files by specifying exclude-patterns.
Either specify them with multiple --exclude
's or one --exclude-file
$ cat exclude
# exclude go-files
*.go
# exclude foo/x/y/z/bar foo/x/bar foo/bar
foo/**/bar
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup ~/work --exclude=*.c --exclude-file=exclude
Patterns use filepath.Glob
internally,
see filepath.Match
for syntax.
Additionally **
excludes arbitrary subdirectories.
Environment-variables in exclude-files are expanded with os.ExpandEnv
.
By specifying the option --one-file-system
you can instruct restic to only
backup files from the file systems the initially specified files or directories
reside on. For example, calling restic like this won't backup /sys
or
/dev
on a Linux system:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup --one-file-system /
By using the --files-from
option you can read the files you want to backup
from a file. This is especially useful if a lot of files have to be backed up
that are not in the same folder or are maybe pre-filtered by other software.
For example maybe you want to backup files that have a certain filename in them:
$ find /tmp/somefiles | grep 'PATTERN' > /tmp/files_to_backup
You can then use restic to backup the filtered files:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup --files-from /tmp/files_to_backup
Incidentally you can also combine --files-from
with the normal files args:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup --files-from /tmp/files_to_backup /tmp/some_additional_file
Reading data from stdin
Sometimes it can be nice to directly save the output of a program, e.g.
mysqldump
so that the SQL can later be restored. Restic supports this mode of
operation, just supply the option --stdin
to the backup
command like this:
$ mysqldump [...] | restic -r /tmp/backup backup --stdin
This creates a new snapshot of the output of mysqldump
. You can then use e.g.
the fuse mounting option (see below) to mount the repository and read the file.
By default, the file name stdin
is used, a different name can be specified
with --stdin-filename
, e.g. like this:
$ mysqldump [...] | restic -r /tmp/backup backup --stdin --stdin-filename production.sql
Tags
Snapshots can have one or more tags, short strings which add identifying
information. Just specify the tags for a snapshot with --tag
:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup backup --tag projectX ~/shared/work/web
[...]
The tags can later be used to keep (or forget) snapshots.
List all snapshots
Now, you can list all the snapshots stored in the repository:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots
enter password for repository:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
40dc1520 2015-05-08 21:38:30 kasimir /home/user/work
79766175 2015-05-08 21:40:19 kasimir /home/user/work
bdbd3439 2015-05-08 21:45:17 luigi /home/art
590c8fc8 2015-05-08 21:47:38 kazik /srv
9f0bc19e 2015-05-08 21:46:11 luigi /srv
You can filter the listing by directory path:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots --path="/srv"
enter password for repository:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
590c8fc8 2015-05-08 21:47:38 kazik /srv
9f0bc19e 2015-05-08 21:46:11 luigi /srv
Or filter by host:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots --host luigi
enter password for repository:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
bdbd3439 2015-05-08 21:45:17 luigi /home/art
9f0bc19e 2015-05-08 21:46:11 luigi /srv
Combining filters is also possible.
Restore a snapshot
Restoring a snapshot is as easy as it sounds, just use the following command to
restore the contents of the latest snapshot to /tmp/restore-work
:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup restore 79766175 --target ~/tmp/restore-work
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/user/work] at 2015-05-08 21:40:19.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-work
Use the word latest
to restore the last backup. You can also combine latest
with the --host
and --path
filters to choose the last backup for a specific
host, path or both.
$ restic -r /tmp/backup restore latest --target ~/tmp/restore-work --path "/home/art" --host luigi
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/art] at 2015-05-08 21:45:17.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-work
Manage repository keys
The key
command allows you to set multiple access keys or passwords per
repository. In fact, you can use the list
, add
, remove
and passwd
sub-commands to manage these keys very precisely:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup key list
enter password for repository:
ID User Host Created
----------------------------------------------------------------------
*eb78040b username kasimir 2015-08-12 13:29:57
$ restic -r /tmp/backup key add
enter password for repository:
enter password for new key:
enter password again:
saved new key as <Key of username@kasimir, created on 2015-08-12 13:35:05.316831933 +0200 CEST>
$ restic -r backup key list
enter password for repository:
ID User Host Created
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5c657874 username kasimir 2015-08-12 13:35:05
*eb78040b username kasimir 2015-08-12 13:29:57
Check integrity and consistency
Imagine your repository is saved on a server that has a faulty hard drive, or even worse, attackers get privileged access and modify your backup with the intention to make you restore malicious data:
$ sudo echo "boom" >> backup/index/d795ffa99a8ab8f8e42cec1f814df4e48b8f49129360fb57613df93739faee97
In order to detect these things, it is a good idea to regularly use the check
command to test whether everything is alright, your precious backup data is
consistent and the integrity is unharmed:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup check
Load indexes
ciphertext verification failed
Trying to restore a snapshot which has been modified as shown above will yield the same error:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup restore 79766175 --target ~/tmp/restore-work
Load indexes
ciphertext verification failed
Mount a repository
Browsing your backup as a regular file system is also very easy. First, create
a mount point such as /mnt/restic
and then use the following command to serve
the repository with FUSE:
$ mkdir /mnt/restic
$ restic -r /tmp/backup mount /mnt/restic
enter password for repository:
Now serving /tmp/backup at /tmp/restic
Don't forget to umount after quitting!
Mounting repositories via FUSE is not possible on Windows and OpenBSD.
Restic supports storage and preservation of hard links. However, since hard links exist in the scope of a filesystem by definition, restoring hard links from a fuse mount should be done by a program that preserves hard links. A program that does so is rsync, used with the option --hard-links.
Create an SFTP repository
In order to backup data via SFTP, you must first set up a server with SSH and let it know your public key. Passwordless login is really important since restic fails to connect to the repository if the server prompts for credentials.
Once the server is configured, the setup of the SFTP repository can simply be
achieved by changing the URL scheme in the init
command:
$ restic -r sftp:user@host:/tmp/backup init
enter password for new backend:
enter password again:
created restic backend f1c6108821 at sftp:user@host:/tmp/backup
Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository.
Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.
You can also specify a relative (read: no slash (/
) character at the
beginning) directory, in this case the dir is relative to the remote user's
home directory.
Create a REST server repository
In order to backup data to the remote server via HTTP or HTTPS protocol, you must first set up a remote REST server instance. Once the server is configured, accessing it is achieved by changing the URL scheme like this:
$ restic -r rest:http://host:8000/
Depending on your REST server setup, you can use HTTPS protocol, password protection, or multiple repositories. Or any combination of those features, as you see fit. TCP/IP port is also configurable. Here are some more examples:
$ restic -r rest:https://host:8000/
$ restic -r rest:https://user:pass@host:8000/
$ restic -r rest:https://user:pass@host:8000/my_backup_repo/
If you use TLS, make sure your certificates are signed, 'cause restic client will refuse to communicate otherwise. It's easy to obtain such certificates today, thanks to free certificate authorities like Let’s Encrypt.
REST server uses exactly the same directory structure as local backend, so you should be able to access it both locally and via HTTP, even simultaneously.
Create an Amazon S3 repository
Restic can backup data to any Amazon S3 bucket. However, in this case, changing the URL scheme is not enough since Amazon uses special security credentials to sign HTTP requests. By consequence, you must first setup the following environment variables with the credentials you obtained while creating the bucket.
$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<MY_ACCESS_KEY>
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<MY_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
You can then easily initialize a repository that uses your Amazon S3 as a backend, if the bucket does not exist yet it will be created in the default location:
$ restic -r s3:s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name init
enter password for new backend:
enter password again:
created restic backend eefee03bbd at s3:s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name
Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository.
Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.
It is not possible at the moment to have restic create a new bucket in a different location, so you need to create it using a different program. Afterwards, the S3 server (s3.amazonaws.com
) will redirect restic to the correct endpoint.
For an S3-compatible server that is not Amazon (like Minio, see below), or is
only available via HTTP, you can specify the URL to the server like this:
s3:http://server:port/bucket_name
.
Create a Minio Server repository
Minio is an Open Source Object Storage, written in Go and compatible with AWS S3 API.
Pre-Requisites
- Download and Install Minio Server.
- You can also refer to https://docs.minio.io for step by step guidance on installation and getting started on Minio Client and Minio Server.
You must first setup the following environment variables with the credentials of your running Minio Server.
$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<YOUR-MINIO-ACCESS-KEY-ID>
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= <YOUR-MINIO-SECRET-ACCESS-KEY>
Now you can easily initialize restic to use Minio server as backend with this command.
$ ./restic -r s3:http://localhost:9000/restic init
enter password for new backend:
enter password again:
created restic backend 6ad29560f5 at s3:http://localhost:9000/restic1
Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access
the repository. Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.
Removing old snapshots
All backup space is finite, so restic allows removing old snapshots. This can
be done either manually (by specifying a snapshot ID to remove) or by using a
policy that describes which snapshots to forget. For all remove operations, two
commands need to be called in sequence: forget
to remove a snapshot and
prune
to actually remove the data that was referenced by the snapshot from
the repository. This can be automated with the --prune
option of the forget
command, which runs prune
automatically if snapshots have been removed.
Remove a single snapshot
The command snapshots
can be used to list all snapshots in a repository like this:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots
enter password for repository:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
40dc1520 2015-05-08 21:38:30 kasimir /home/user/work
79766175 2015-05-08 21:40:19 kasimir /home/user/work
bdbd3439 2015-05-08 21:45:17 luigi /home/art
590c8fc8 2015-05-08 21:47:38 kazik /srv
9f0bc19e 2015-05-08 21:46:11 luigi /srv
In order to remove the snapshot of /home/art
, use the forget
command and
specify the snapshot ID on the command line:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup forget bdbd3439
enter password for repository:
removed snapshot d3f01f63
Afterwards this snapshot is removed:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots
enter password for repository:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
40dc1520 2015-05-08 21:38:30 kasimir /home/user/work
79766175 2015-05-08 21:40:19 kasimir /home/user/work
590c8fc8 2015-05-08 21:47:38 kazik /srv
9f0bc19e 2015-05-08 21:46:11 luigi /srv
But the data that was referenced by files in this snapshot is still stored in
the repository. To cleanup unreferenced data, the prune
command must be run:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup prune
enter password for repository:
counting files in repo
building new index for repo
[0:00] 100.00% 22 / 22 files
repository contains 22 packs (8512 blobs) with 100.092 MiB bytes
processed 8512 blobs: 0 duplicate blobs, 0B duplicate
load all snapshots
find data that is still in use for 1 snapshots
[0:00] 100.00% 1 / 1 snapshots
found 8433 of 8512 data blobs still in use
will rewrite 3 packs
creating new index
[0:00] 86.36% 19 / 22 files
saved new index as 544a5084
done
Afterwards the repository is smaller.
You can automate this two-step process by using the --prune
switch to
forget
:
$ restic forget --keep-last 1 --prune
snapshots for host mopped, directories /home/user/work:
keep 1 snapshots:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4bba301e 2017-02-21 10:49:18 mopped /home/user/work
remove 1 snapshots:
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
8c02b94b 2017-02-21 10:48:33 mopped /home/user/work
1 snapshots have been removed, running prune
counting files in repo
building new index for repo
[0:00] 100.00% 37 / 37 packs
repository contains 37 packs (5521 blobs) with 151.012 MiB bytes
processed 5521 blobs: 0 duplicate blobs, 0B duplicate
load all snapshots
find data that is still in use for 1 snapshots
[0:00] 100.00% 1 / 1 snapshots
found 5323 of 5521 data blobs still in use, removing 198 blobs
will delete 0 packs and rewrite 27 packs, this frees 22.106 MiB
creating new index
[0:00] 100.00% 30 / 30 packs
saved new index as b49f3e68
done
Removing snapshots according to a policy
Removing snapshots manually is tedious and error-prone, therefore restic allows
specifying which snapshots should be removed automatically according to a
policy. You can specify how many hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly
snapshots to keep, any other snapshots are removed. The most important
command-line parameter here is --dry-run
which instructs restic to not remove
anything but print which snapshots would be removed.
When forget
is run with a policy, restic loads the list of all snapshots,
then groups these by host name and list of directories. The policy is then
applied to each group of snapshots separately. This is a safety feature.
The forget
command accepts the following parameters:
--keep-last n
never delete then
last (most recent) snapshots--keep-hourly n
for the lastn
hours in which a snapshot was made, keep only the last snapshot for each hour.--keep-daily n
for the lastn
days which have one or more snapshots, only keep the last one for that day.--keep-weekly n
for the lastn
weeks which have one or more snapshots, only keep the last one for that week.--keep-monthly n
for the lastn
months which have one or more snapshots, only keep the last one for that month.--keep-yearly n
for the lastn
years which have one or more snapshots, only keep the last one for that year.--keep-tag
keep all snapshots which have all tags specified by this option (can be specified multiple times).
Additionally, you can restrict removing snapshots to those which have a
particular hostname with the --hostname
parameter, or tags with the --tag
option. When multiple tags are specified, only the snapshots which have all the
tags are considered.
All the --keep-*
options above only count hours/days/weeks/months/years which
have a snapshot, so those without a snapshot are ignored.
Let's explain this with an example: Suppose you have only made a backup on each
Sunday for 12 weeks. Then forget --keep-daily 4
will keep the last four snapshots
for the last four Sundays, but remove the rest. Only counting the days which
have a backup and ignore the ones without is a safety feature: it prevents
restic from removing many snapshots when no new ones are created. If it was
implemented otherwise, running forget --keep-daily 4
on a Friday would remove
all snapshots!
Debugging restic
The program can be built with debug support like this:
$ go run build.go -tags debug
Afterwards, extensive debug messages are written to the file in environment
variable DEBUG_LOG
, e.g.:
$ DEBUG_LOG=/tmp/restic-debug.log restic backup ~/work
If you suspect that there is a bug, you can have a look at the debug log. Please be aware that the debug log might contain sensitive information such as file and directory names.
The debug log will always contain all log messages restic generates. You can
also instruct restic to print some or all debug messages to stderr. These can
also be limited to e.g. a list of source files or a list of patterns for
function names. The patterns are globbing patterns (see the documentation for
path.Glob
), multiple patterns are
separated by commas. Patterns are case sensitive.
Printing all log messages to the console can be achieved by setting the file
filter to *
:
$ DEBUG_FILES=* restic check
If you want restic to just print all debug log messages from the files
main.go
and lock.go
, set the environment variable DEBUG_FILES
like this:
$ DEBUG_FILES=main.go,lock.go restic check
The following command line instructs restic to only print debug statements
originating in functions that match the pattern *unlock*
(case sensitive):
$ DEBUG_FUNCS=*unlock* restic check
Under the hood: Browse repository objects
Internally, a repository stores data of several different types described in the design documentation. You can list
objects such as blobs, packs, index, snapshots, keys or locks with the following command:
$ restic -r /tmp/backup list snapshots
d369ccc7d126594950bf74f0a348d5d98d9e99f3215082eb69bf02dc9b3e464c
The find
command searches for a given
pattern in the repository.
$ restic -r backup find test.txt
debug log file restic.log
debug enabled
enter password for repository:
found 1 matching entries in snapshot 196bc5760c909a7681647949e80e5448e276521489558525680acf1bd428af36
-rw-r--r-- 501 20 5 2015-08-26 14:09:57 +0200 CEST path/to/test.txt
The cat
command allows you to display the JSON representation of the objects
or its raw content.
$ restic -r /tmp/backup cat snapshot d369ccc7d126594950bf74f0a348d5d98d9e99f3215082eb69bf02dc9b3e464c
enter password for repository:
{
"time": "2015-08-12T12:52:44.091448856+02:00",
"tree": "05cec17e8d3349f402576d02576a2971fc0d9f9776ce2f441c7010849c4ff5af",
"paths": [
"/home/user/work"
],
"hostname": "kasimir",
"username": "username",
"uid": 501,
"gid": 20
}
Scripting restic
Restic supports the output of some commands in JSON format. The JSON flag --json
is currently supported only by restic snapshots
.
$ restic -r /tmp/backup snapshots --json```