restic
Cross-platform backup program with encryption, deduplication, and support for local/cloud storage backends
restic is a backup program that creates encrypted, deduplicated snapshots of files and directories. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, using strong cryptography to ensure backup confidentiality and integrity even when stored in untrusted environments.
The tool operates through simple commands like restic init to create repositories, restic backup to create snapshots, and restic restore to recover files. It includes a mount feature via FUSE that allows browsing previous snapshots as a filesystem. restic performs incremental backups with automatic deduplication, storing only changed data between snapshots.
restic supports numerous storage backends including local directories, SFTP servers, HTTP REST servers, and major cloud providers like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, BackBlaze B2, and OpenStack Swift. Additional services are accessible through rclone integration. The program is designed for daily backup workflows where network or disk bandwidth is the primary limitation rather than processing overhead.
System administrators, DevOps engineers, and users requiring reliable encrypted backups across multiple platforms would benefit from restic's combination of security, efficiency, and broad storage backend support.