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Restic 0.13.0

restic.net

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Re: Restic 0.13.0

#51

Post by wink »

aborsy wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #3

Unless it's for experimenting, I've stopped caring for backup solutions other than borg and zfs as the only way to prove their stability is to have them exist for a while without big complaints and new ones all seem to have complaints. Just having no data loss isn't enough which is the absolute base point but huge memory consumption and other operational issues are also showstoppers.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

Didn't encounter any problems on Linux... but on Windows I ran into an issue the first time I used it (might me by personal bad luck though).

If you're using restic on Windows, maybe take a minute to check https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/3637 - it was my first contribution to restic and it seems to have stalled, but I'm not sure if it's a general "oh, windows" problem no one takes seriously in a project that 90% of the maintainers use on Linux like so very often :P

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#52

Post by mekster »

aborsy wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #3

Unless it's for experimenting, I've stopped caring for backup solutions other than borg and zfs as the only way to prove their stability is to have them exist for a while without big complaints and new ones all seem to have complaints. Just having no data loss isn't enough which is the absolute base point but huge memory consumption and other operational issues are also showstoppers.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

> ZFS is a file system, and has serious limitation when used as a backup tool.

But it's definitely the best as it knows everything that happened on the filesystem unlike any other tools that require entire scanning of the repo directories on every run.

You can read how zfs performs better than a rsync run.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync...

Also, you can even take database backup as a file system snapshot which is far easier than any other database backup which isn't always simple.

> basically self host your ZFS system, which is costly and error prone

How is this so? Just run Ubuntu, install zfs userland and it works or just use rsync.net (not affiliated but can't find a better service that accepts zfs send). Don't try on RH based distro as its support is pretty bad on zfs.

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#53

Post by mekster »

aborsy wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #3

Unless it's for experimenting, I've stopped caring for backup solutions other than borg and zfs as the only way to prove their stability is to have them exist for a while without big complaints and new ones all seem to have complaints. Just having no data loss isn't enough which is the absolute base point but huge memory consumption and other operational issues are also showstoppers.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

> Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg

How large is your repo? How stable is the memory usage?

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#54

Post by aborsy »

mekster wrote: post #52
aborsy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

> ZFS is a file system, and has serious limitation when used as a backup tool. But it's definitely the best as it knows everything that happened on the filesystem unlike any other tools that require entire scanning of the repo directories on every run. You can read how zfs performs better than a rsync run. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync... Also, you can even take database backup as a fil…

I run ZFS on my systems including with Ubuntu (the support has recently come out of experimental, in Ubuntu 22.04, and it’s pretty good with Zsys). It’s a superb file system, but to use ZFS send, you need: a RAID server (ideally with ECC RAM), and another mirror in a different place for replication. So, two TrueNAS servers, for instance. It costs in hardware and electricity, and sysadmin maintenance time.

Restic and Borg are portable. You can send to, and recover from, any cloud provider for cheap.

There is rsync.net for ZFS, it requires minimum 1TB and it’s still more expensive than alternatives (because they have to assign to you RAM and some CPU too).

If you have a ZFS backup system, use that. Ordinary people might be better off with a tool that works with any cloud storage.

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#55

Post by aborsy »

mekster wrote: post #53
aborsy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

> Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg How large is your repo? How stable is the memory usage?

Up to 1TB. I recall a very recent post in restic forums from someone with a 100 TB repo!

No issue with RAM usage. Also Restic runs much faster since 1.12, RAM usage is now more limited in time duration.

I don’t have first hand experience with larger repositories.

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#56

Post by omnimus »

rvieira wrote: post #24

For someone using Kopia, is there any major advantage in switching to restic?

I am using restic and thinking about switching to Kopia... Mainly because Kopia has compression and seems to have more activity in development. It also has gui. And from what i've seen is faster.

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#57

Post by mekster »

aborsy wrote: post #54
mekster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS is a file system, and has serious limitation when used as a backup tool. But it's definitely the best as it knows everything that happened on the filesystem unlike any other tools that require entire scanning of the repo directories on every run. You can read how zfs performs better than a rsync run. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync... Also, you can even take database backup as a fil…

I run ZFS on my systems including with Ubuntu (the support has recently come out of experimental, in Ubuntu 22.04, and it’s pretty good with Zsys). It’s a superb file system, but to use ZFS send, you need: a RAID server (ideally with ECC RAM), and another mirror in a different place for replication. So, two TrueNAS servers, for instance. It costs in hardware and electricity, and sysadmin maintenance time. Restic and…

Just to get started, all you need is a 2GB Ubuntu instance that is $10/mo or pick rsync.net with zfs capability which gives you 1TB for $25/mo.

If you want easy fast backup, even hobbyist shouldn't overlook zfs.

Besides, Borg doesn't work with any cloud providers but only can go against ssh servers. You can also use Hetzner than rsync.net for this.

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#58

Post by ThomasWaldmann »

aborsy wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #3

Unless it's for experimenting, I've stopped caring for backup solutions other than borg and zfs as the only way to prove their stability is to have them exist for a while without big complaints and new ones all seem to have complaints. Just having no data loss isn't enough which is the absolute base point but huge memory consumption and other operational issues are also showstoppers.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

About "Borg’s crypto has known limitations":

We've just merged new crypto code into master, based on AEAD ciphers (AES-OCB and chacha20-poly1305) and session keys - so the potential nonce management issues are soon a thing of the past.

There's current work adding argon2id as default for the KDF (was: pbkdf2), likely soon to be merged.

Also checking blake3 for the ID hash (MAC) right now (but platform / build compatibility has yet to be seen).

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#59

Post by ThomasWaldmann »

aborsy wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #3

Unless it's for experimenting, I've stopped caring for backup solutions other than borg and zfs as the only way to prove their stability is to have them exist for a while without big complaints and new ones all seem to have complaints. Just having no data loss isn't enough which is the absolute base point but huge memory consumption and other operational issues are also showstoppers.

Restic in my experience has been rock solid. I actually switched from Borg. Borg’s crypto has known limitations; its Python error messages are long and messy; it complained more frequently. Restic’s repository format is simple and well documented, which is important for long term data recovery (and fixes in case changes occur in the repo). The crypto is from a good source, and well regarded. Multithreaded, fast, nice…

The "long and messy" python error messages are python tracebacks and often intentionally displayed by borg to ease locating and fixing bugs.

Of course we could also display shorter error messages (and we do that at some places, if the cause of the exception is well known / expected), but be glad to have the long form and not just "something went wrong" (which is very pretty, but completely useless). :-)

Re: Restic 0.13.0

#60

Post by sliken »

sigio wrote: post #26
cma wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borg being single-threaded is painful in the era of consumer 12 and 16 core CPUs, and even prosumer 64-core.

Don't notice this much.... disk is usually the bottleneck, and otherwise it will be the network to the remote backup location. Still backups complete in seconds: Repository: ssh://backup/./backups/mungedhostname.borg Archive name: 20220327-2201 Archive fingerprint: 8b710144579c8d531e7c4a0192304323081b14a71445557608d859494bbe84b6 Time (start): Sun, 2022-03-27 22:01:35 Time (end): Sun, 2022-03-27 22:01:52 Duration: 17.…

Sure, for spinning disks, but deduplication, compression, and encryption can easily be the bottleneck if you have some NVMEs.
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