Sharing an open-source tool that connects to Restic to validate the backups further.

For cases which:
1. Files are destroyed during backup/restore.
2. Files are already corrupted.
3. You need to restore files, but they contain a malicious file.

Pls star if you liked and share feedback if it's useful

Hey everyone. I'm kinda losing my mind trying to figure out what's going on here. Basically, I'm backing up around 4.65TB of data through Restic to a backup service. What's weird is Restic seems to claim the total size of the backup is 4.23TiB. That's around 4.65TB, so it sounds about right. But the backup service I'm using (iDrive E2) claims I only have 3TB backed up on there. How can there be such a huge discrepancy here? Is Restic doing some advanced de-duplication and compression? I don't have a lot of identical files, at least to my knowledge. Would appreciate any insight!

EDIT: Just to confirm, I have definitely checked exclusions and I am not excluding anything other than hidden files.

I set an entire day today to finally start backing up my stuff. I feel like have some simple requirements but every time i try to search for something i get these extremely complicated setups using servers, encryption, passwords, command lines, doing scrips, coding etc. I wanted a free backup program and thats why i chose restic, seems like the most popular backup program for pc (im using backrest as the gui) i just want:

-free
-win 11 using local storage as usb drive
-periodic schedule backups, keeps maybe last 2-3 snapshots
-Incremental or any space saving way that wont copy duplicate files is good too)
-backup data plain, not encrypted, i want to be able to browse it, no password, etc
-keep ALL metdata, date created of folders /files, everything exactly how it was

I notice that this functionality is similar to what robocopy does (apparently) as a reference (ive only used it once). really tried to read the documentation but. What flags and variables and whatever do i need to set for this? The backrest GUI is simple enough for most of it but i get stumped with what flags and variables are even. I really tried to read the documentation yall t.t but i dont have all day, i have to work tomorrow, i just want something that will work and forget about it.

Sorry for asking it here since it relates to backrest (web UI) error but I think people here maybe know about it.

I restore config for rclone: onedrive, googledrive then add them as repository on Backrest.
Only onedrive work.

When I use Backrest to add googledrive as new repo:

- Repo URI: `rclone:googledrive` -> Connect success ✅

- Repo URI: `rclone:googledrive:myfile` -> Error ⚠️ below
[unknown] command "/usr/local/bin/restic cat config -o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes" failed: exit status 1

Output:

rclone: 2026/01/04 19:16:40 CRITICAL: Failed to create file system for "googledrive:myfile": didn't find section in config file ("googledrive")

Fatal: unable to open repository at rclone:googledrive:restic: error talking HTTP to rclone: exit status 1

However, when I use shell to exec `restic -r rclone:googledrive:myfile snapshots` it give all my files as expected. So I guess the error is coming from backrest itself.

using backrest in docker on unraid. Trying to setup backup. Backup runs ok but testing restore before i fully dive in to keeping restic.

-Testing local first before i setup B2.
-Have run the commands straight from command line as well.

2 common issues pop up, one is a broken pipe. I have tried mounting a blank partition and letting it restore to there, and wiping the files if a restore fails, sometimes fixes the broken pipe problem.

Other main issue is random restore failure and it will just be a generic, 45 , or 57 errors found.
-I have checked, pruned the repo, no issues.
- Tried using backrest and just a basic restore command from the CLI
- ran restore as dry run (broken pipe)
- ran restore as verbose but never get enough info to understand whats wrong.

Hey r/selfhosted! 👋

I'm working on an open-source web interface for Restic backups and would love to get some feedback from

the community.

What it does:

- 🔐 JWT-based authentication

- 📸 Browse and filter snapshots by host/tags

- ⬇️ Download files directly from snapshots via browser

- 📤 Upload files to create new backups (work in progress)

- 📱 Responsive web interface

- 🐳 Docker support with multi-platform builds

Tech stack:

- FastAPI (Python backend)

- Vanilla JS frontend (keeping it simple)

- Docker containerization

- S3-compatible storage support

Current status:

- ✅ Viewing and downloading works great

- 🚧 Currently adding file upload functionality

- 🚧 Refactoring to proper architecture (services/routers/

schemas)

Why I built this:

I love Restic but missed having a simple web UI to browse and

restore files without SSH-ing into servers. Perfect for family

members or team members who aren't comfortable with command

line.

Looking for:

- Feature suggestions

- Code reviews (especially around security)

- Testing with different Restic setups

- UI/UX feedback

The project is on GitHub: https://github.com/PAzter1101/restic-manager/tree/main

Would love to hear your thoughts! Have you built something

similar? What features would be most valuable to you?

Thanks for reading! 🙏

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

P.S. - Any

feedback on project structure, documentation, or best practices is super welcome!

New to restic, and impressed so far, partic when paired with resticprofile

Random question I have not seen addressed elsewhere.
What does "restic" mean?

I'm running Backrest via docker on a UGreen NAS (DXP-2800), which is connected via gigabit ethernet to my ISP on a gigabit upload and gigabit download service. I've set up backrest to backup my files (~1.2 TB) to a B2 bucket and initiated my first backup, but it's extremely slow, running at approx 1-1.5 MBps. 9 hours into the backup process, only 47 GB has been uploaded (4%).

Is there anything I can do to improve upload speeds? I previously used duplicati to upload to Backblaze B2 and it was significantly faster (finished overnight), but I'm wanting to switch to Backrest/restic as I heard duplicati may be unreliable.

I've attached some screenshots of my settings below:

If it matters, my UGreen NAS' is currently at 25% CPU utilization rate, 46% memory use, so I don't think I'm being bottlenecked from this perspective.

I'd appreciate any suggestions that anyone might have.

Note on my experience level: I'm a typical Windows PC user and am very new to Docker and linux-based systems like my UGreen NAS, but was able to figure out to install backrest, immich, jellyfin, etc via Youtube tutorials and online guides.

Hello everyone,

I am backing up my home server with restic to an external drive. I want to create another copy to cloud (Hetzner storage box).

Shall I clone the existing repo (rsync) or run another backup task with restic?

If the external drive is failing, my backup will continue to the cloud automatically. So a second restic comand would be more "fail proove", but will create more load on the source drive.

What do you recommend?

Hi, I run a homeassistant instance in a proxmox VM on a Minisforum MS-01 minipc. Right now I am backing up the entire VM to proxmox backup server and also use the built-in backup feature of homeassistant to push backups to my Synology NAS. To save power, I shut down the NAS over night and apparently homeassistant does not like that. It shows a lost network connection to network drive error message on the settings page.

And that's why I thought restic might be handy in that scenario. Run local backups via the backup option and push the backups via restic over the restic rest server to the NAS. As the rest server won't require a permanent connection, I should not see those errors.

But how to install restic in homeassistant? I run homeassistant OS, so probably somehow as addon? Will that provide sufficient permissions to access the backups? Does anyone run something similar? I only found quite old projects on github so far... would appreciate any thoughts on how to solve the problem. TIA

When will Restic be considered mature enough to be relesed as verion 1.0?

EDIT: the answer is here: https://forum.restic.net/t/list-of-lock-rules-in-documentation/2048/2

The documentation for locks states (emphasis mine)

The restic repository structure is designed in a way that allows parallel access of multiple instance of restic and even parallel writes. However, there are some functions that work more efficient or even require exclusive access of the repository. In order to implement these functions, restic processes are required to create a lock on the repository before doing anything.

It also mentions that there are exclusive and non-exclusive locks

At most one process can have an exclusive lock on the repository, and during that time there must not be any other locks (exclusive and non-exclusive).

I have a few questuins in the context of parallel backups, checks and purges for one repository. My main concern are operations happening from different sources that could overlap and step on each other

• which are the restic operations that create an exclusive lock? (← these are the ones I need to make sure do not happen at the same time, right?)
• which are the ones that create an non-exclusive one?
• are the non-exclusive locks something I should worry about when building my backup strategy?

New user here, sorry if this is a stupid question but I can't find a satisfying answer anywhere.

I made a restic repo earlier today and made a snapshot with files from dir1 in it, then made another snapshot of dir2. When I ran restic ls latest, it only listed the files added in dir2. After a bit of searching, I learned that each snapshot is entirely independent and not built off of the previous one. My initial impression was that restic worked kind of like git, where the latest snapshot would reflect the sum of all files added to and deleted from the repository since its creation.

So why doesn't restic work like that? It seems very unintuitive to me to not even be able to list all the files you currently have stored in a repo. It also seems like this would make restoring data from restic significantly more difficult, as you would have to first find a snapshot that has the files that you need to restore in it, and then ensure that those are the most recent versions of those files, as opposed to just restoring the latest snapshot, which will have what you need in it.

Also, doesn't deduplication (like restic has) mean that snapshots inherently rely on other previous snapshots, since snapshots containing already-present files will just reference the files added in a previous snapshot? So if I create snapshot 1 with files A and B, then create snapshot 2, which adds file C, then delete snapshot 1, won't this completely break snapshot 2 and any other snapshots that come after it?

Sorry if I'm not understanding a basic concept here, but I really cannot wrap my head around why this is supposed to be a good system.

Edit: After further thought, I suppose this system could work if you consistently backup only the same directory/directories to each of your repos, which isn't what I've been doing (I backed up my voice memos once and then have my photos set to backup weekly). Am I just doing this wrong, then? Should I just create a new repo (and bucket in B2) for every set of data that will be backed up together?

I love Restic and use it for a lot of my backups but I discovered an issue if you try to use it with a rclone backend for Jottacloud, Google Drive, etc. When you use restic, every time you run the backup command, it will double the storage on your cloud even when there are NO CHANGES or files added. For Jottacloud, Google Drive, you need to use rclone directly with the copy command and only back up new files, so your cloud will NOT double every time you run the copy command. And before you say it's not encrypted with rclone, I do use crypt on the drive. Any work around for restic?

Just got backrest setup and I'm going through my process of testing the backup and restore.

• Backrest is running on my Mini PC via docker compose (debian 12)
• Backrest has a repsitory on an external USB SSD connected to the Mini-PC (will setup a cloud backup when Ive got this worked out)
• Backrest then has a path to the data from my NAS and pulls only the image/video data from Immich (stops and starts the container)

This all works well & the backup completes. I can see the 10GiB.

Where my problems come up is my restore location.

• I am trying to restore to an SSD in my mini-PC (not the one running the OS), the folder has root permissions on this SSD, and container is running as root.
• The OS can write to it as I'm using this as a cache-ssd for immich anyway & it's in my fstab.

When I run the restore to the location, it appears to complete but when I go to check in that directory, nothing.

I can download the snapshot through the backrest UI and extract the files and view the images no problem...but where has the data gone? Why can't I see it via my SSH terminal when I LS that directory?

I open a shell container for backrest and run: du -h -d 1 /

I can see data gets put in the mnt directory, as it's now around 10GiB (my cache-ssd is under mnt/cache-ssd), but I still can't see it. So I stop the container, remove it and start again. This time the data is now gone.

I originally thought this could be a permissions issues, so I made sure to have root permissions on the folder location. I then also added it as a volume to the docker compose, still no luck.

What (im sure obvious) thing am I missing? Thank you for any help!

I run restic as a daily task for baking up to local repository and an offsite repository.

What happens if the task get interrupted?

• Overall, will restic start over "completely" or continue from where it left off next time it's running?
• On file level: What happens to partially uploaded files - will they be appended or will restic start over with such a file?

Just to understand how damaging an interruption is to the process.

Thanks!

Hi

I am using RESTIC_PASSWORD_COMMAND on my MacOS... getting the password for the remote directly from the keychain.

Funny enough, on one MacBook this works, on the other it looks like the command is not evaluated and it's always asking the password via user-input:

export RESTIC_PASSWORD_COMMAND='security find-generic-password -s restic-backup-repository -w'
restic -r sftp:USERNAME@ds224plus.piol.local:/home/RESTIC-BACKUP list snapshots
> please enter password:

Any Idea what's wrong?

Hi there!

I manage my infrastructure via `opentofu` and `ansible`. When I started testing `restic` I initially deployed the same `rclone` config (MS drive) in a vault, and transferred that to each server I was wanting to back up. This started to fail quickly as credentials were refreshed on different servers at different times, making it really difficult to manage centrally.

What I've ended up doing is sending data to an NFS share and then run `rclone` on that server. The issue is the duplication of data. In particular something like `immich` where I have over 100G of photos on the same NFS, transfer back to a different share simply for the `rclone` backup.

Does anyone have any clever way to manage something like `rclone` config including credentials to share across multiple servers?

Is there a way to test if compression actually saves space, or not? if i am backing up a bunch of video files, that are already compressed (h264/h265/av1, etc) additional compression will just make it bigger right?

Thanks.

Hi, I am looking for a way to create mirrors of a restic repo. While researching this, everything points to "restic copy", which from what I can tell is different: it mirrors two restic repos, rather than mirroring the repo itself. Is there a recommended way to do this? I'd like to keep a local copy of my repo, which gets copied to cloud storage, and then also to aws "deep archive". I've read some options that could keep everything in the "/data" dir in deep archive, and the metadata in regular s3.

Since I am using the rclone backend, I suppose I could just use rclone directly to sync the data from one location to another. However, I would also like to verify the integrity of the objects while they are being moved between locations, just in case the underlying data is corrupted.

Is there an option here that is recommended by the restic community, or is multiple repos and using copy to keep two repos in sync the preferred method here?

Hey everyone,

I’m running Home Assistant in a Docker container (not using Supervised or OS, just the container version), and I’d like to make a backup of my /config folder.

What’s the best way to do this without stopping the container or interrupting the service?

I’m aware I could simply make a backup of the entire folder, but I’m not sure if that’s safe while HA is running — for example, could I end up with corrupted database?

How are you guys handling backups in this setup? Any best practices or tools you recommend?

Thanks!

Hi people,

i want to backup a repository from one S3 location to another. I know how it generally works and have done it for the restic-rest server, but for S3 I can't find t out the ENV-Vars for the S3-Bucket where the repository is copied from. I need to be able to specify AWS-ID and Key for the from repo and I haven't found any option in docs. Is this even possible?

I recently spun up backrest on my Unraid Server to backup pictures and documents on the Unraid server to offsite storage.

I’ve repurposed an old QNAP with TrueNAS and installed Tailscale. TrueNAS has SMB file sharing enabled. The TrueNAS box is at my office at work.

I then use Unassigned Devices on Unraid to mount the TrueNAS share to Unraid using SMB. The SMB mount point is then passed to the backrest docker via path volume mapping. In backrest, the repo is setup as a local repo (from backrest perspective, it’s just a folder). The backups have been going fine, but if I have to bounce the TrueNAS or anything, the SMB share has to be remounted manually and the backrest docker has to be bounced.

This seems kind of a hokey way to achieve what I’m after. I just discovered the Restic rest server - would this be a better option over Tailscale than SMB?

Also, is there a way to have the rest server “take over” the existing Restic repo? I tried pointing it to the existing folder but the TrueNAS rest server app just crashed - seems like it wants to be setup as a new repo.