rest-server VS others

Similar here. Termux with restic, so it does deduplication and encryption and such (also compression since a few months but haven't turned it on yet).

On local laptop: run https://github.com/restic/rest-server/ to accept the incoming data, then (if 1234 is the port that rest-server runs on):

    user@laptop:~$ ssh -R 1234:localhost:1234 root@phone

I use restic to a cloud storage provider and restic-server to another nas. I used hyperbackup for a long time but proved to not be flexible enough and I wanted to get away from a proprietary backup that could only be restored on another Synology.

Have a look at restic and restic-rest-server.

Min.io is just one of the supported storage backends. If you prefer, the restic rest server seems to be supported and might be easier to host. https://github.com/restic/rest-server

restic with rest-server

This one is quite unclear:

> We have added checksums for various backends so data uploaded to a backend can be checked there.

What do you mean checksums? All data is already stored in files with as filename the sha256sum of the contents, so clearly it's all already checksummed and can be verified right?

Looking into the changelog entry[1], this is about verifying the integrity upon uploading:

> The verification works by informing the backend about the expected hash of the uploaded file. The backend then verifies the upload and thereby rules out any data corruption during upload. \n\n [...] besides integrity checking for uploads [this] also means that restic can now be used to store backups in S3 buckets which have Object Lock enabled.

Object lock is mentioned in passing (and only in this more detailed info) but this is a big one. S3 docs:

> Object Lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely.

i.e. ransomware protection. Good luck wiping backups if your backup host refuses to overwrite or delete the files. And you know the files are good because they match their hash.

Extortion is still a thing, but if people would use this, it more-or-less wipes out the attack vector of ransomware. The only risk is if the attacker is in your systems long enough to outlast your retention period. Did anyone say "test your backups"?

For self-hosting, restic has a custom back-end called rest-server[2] for that which supports a so-called "append-only mode" (no overwriting or deleting). I worked on the docs for this[3] together with rawtaz and MichaelEischer to make this more secure, because eventually, of course, your disks are full or you want to stop paying for legacy data on S3, and an attacker could have added dummy backups to fool your automatic removal script into thinking it needs to leave only the dummy backups. Using the right retention options, this attack cannot happen.

Others are doing some pretty cool stuff in the backup sphere as well, e.g. bupstash[4] has public key encryption so you don't need to have the decryption keys as a backup client.

[1] https://github.com/restic/restic/releases/v0.13.0

[2] https://github.com/restic/rest-server/

[3] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/060_forget.html#secu...

[4] https://github.com/andrewchambers/bupstash/

The append-only mode can be implemented using https://github.com/restic/rest-server or services like rsync.net that offer read-only zfs snapshots. Doesn’t solve the asymmetric crypto of course.

But how is that better than running the REST server which is also an HTTP-based API? Or is it? I suspect the answer is going to be system dependent but I am curious.

Also see Restic's list of Linux backup software. https://github.com/restic/others

There is also https://github.com/restic/others which has some keywords (e.g. is it encrypted, does it do compression) for most FOSS backup solutions. It can be outdated or incomplete for some entries, though.

https://github.com/restic/others is a nice collection of free software links too - you can click through those and see if any are Windows supporting. But I'd personally just go with restic.

Backblaze is an awful piece of software when you look at it from “a backup software” point of view. It’s made pretty, simple, native (or is it Electron now?) - yes. But then it stops there. On top of that if you read there ifs, buts, and gotchas you’d want to stay far away from them.

They’ve downright absurd data deletion/retention and versioning rules.

Besides I do not trust any service that promises to give anything “unlimited” for a fixed cost.

As I usually mention in comments on this topic - I’d strongly urge people to use and support backup tools like borgbackup.org (Vorta is an excellent Borg GUI), restic.net (a GUI is glaringly missing), kopia.io (up and coming; promising; comes with a GUI), for smaller datasets there’s very good but more expansive Tarsnap (not FOSS).

And then there are others - https://github.com/restic/others#list-of-backup-software