Discover Restic
Restic is a command-line backup tool available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It supports encryption as standard and is very easy to use. The functionality of Restic on those operating systems is nearly identical; for example, each version supports local and cloud backups.
Restic understands the principles of full and differential backups. It can be part of a file transfer-type backup process (copying workstation data to a central location), as we saw with Robocopy for Windows, or it can be scripted to support GFS-type backup strategies.
We’ll be looking at some of the simple backup and verification commands we can perform with Restic. For a more comprehensive overview of its capabilities, check out the Restic site and official documentation.
Install Restic Packages on Linux
Restic is not usually installed by default on Linux, but it is available directly from the official repositories for most mainstream versions. Our Linux computer runs Linux Mint, which uses the apt command to install packages. Run the following command to install Restic on your Linux machine:
sudo apt install restic
You can check whether Restic is installed on your computer by trying to run it, and if it’s not, see how to in the video below:
To check if you have Restic already installed, type this command:
restic
If Restic is installed, you will see a welcome screen with a command summary. If you get a “command not found” error message, then you’ll have to install it. Fortunately, all major Linux distributions have it in their standard repositories, so you can just run the following command (Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint) in root (sudo) mode to get it loaded up:
sudo apt-get install restic
Let’s Recap!
Restic is a command-line tool designed to support backup and restore operations.
Restic is available for most mainstream operating systems.
Like Robocopy, Restic can be scripted to make it easy to incorporate into scheduled operations.
You’re now ready to dive into Restic and see how you can use it to design and test a scripted backup service.
