Restic

Restic is a modern, open-source backup program designed to be fast, efficient, and secure by default. Written in Go, it produces a single binary with no dependencies, making it exceptionally easy to deploy on any server. Every backup is encrypted with AES-256 and authenticated with Poly1305-AES before it leaves the machine, ensuring data security without any additional configuration.

The deduplication engine is one of Restic's strongest features. It splits files into variable-length chunks using a content-defined chunking algorithm, then deduplicates at the chunk level. This means that if a large database dump changes by only a few megabytes, Restic only stores the changed chunks. The result is dramatically reduced backup storage requirements and faster incremental backups compared to traditional full/incremental backup approaches.

Restic supports a wide range of storage backends out of the box: local directories, SFTP, Amazon S3 (and S3-compatible services like Backblaze B2, Wasabi, MinIO), Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and rclone-compatible backends (which opens up dozens more services). The repository format is the same regardless of backend, making it easy to migrate backups between storage providers.

For hosting environments, Restic excels at backing up server data to remote cloud storage. A typical setup involves a cron job or systemd timer running nightly backups of web files, database dumps, email data, and configuration files to an S3-compatible backend. The forget and prune commands manage retention policies, automatically removing old snapshots based on configurable rules (keep last 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, etc.).

Performance is excellent. Restic can saturate a gigabit network connection during backups and restores. The restore process is straightforward since any snapshot can be mounted as a FUSE filesystem or restored to a directory. Individual file recovery is simple because you can browse any snapshot and extract specific files.

Compared to Duplicati, Restic is more command-line focused (no built-in web UI) but tends to be more reliable with large backup sets and offers better performance. It is a favorite among sysadmins who prefer scriptable, no-nonsense backup tools.