Restic Backup Tool

Restic is a fast, secure, and efficient backup program that provides deduplicated, encrypted, and verified backups to local and remote storage backends. Created by Alexander Neumann in 2014, with over 27,000 stars as of 2026, Restic is widely used for personal and enterprise backup automation. Key features include: encryption (all backup data including filenames, metadata, and content is encrypted with AES-256-CTR and Poly1305-AES authentication using a single repository password, no plaintext data is ever stored or transmitted), deduplication (content-defined chunking with CDC algorithm splits files into variable-size blocks, only unique blocks are stored, deduplicating across files and snapshots to minimize storage usage), snapshot model (each backup creates an immutable snapshot representing the complete file system state at backup time, with efficient incremental backups storing only changed blocks), backends (local filesystem, SFTP, HTTP REST server, Amazon S3, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Wasabi, and OpenStack Swift), integrity verification (SHA-256 hash verification of all data blocks on backup and restore, with check command for verifying repository integrity), cache (local cache of repository index and pack metadata to reduce network bandwidth), repository maintenance (prune removes unreferenced data, forget removes old snapshots, and check verifies repository integrity), keys and access (repository password for encryption and optional append-only mode for untrusted backup targets), parallel processing (multi-threaded encryption, hashing, and upload for high throughput), exclude patterns (file and directory exclusion via glob patterns), and scripting-friendly (designed for automated, unattended operation with exit codes and JSON output for monitoring).