# restic

83 Hacker News commenters recommended restic and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, open-source command-line backup tool with encrypted, deduplicated snapshots that work with many cloud and local storage. Caveat: setup is fiddly and not turnkey.

## Why people recommend it

- Client-side encryption and deduplication (7 comments): "The deduplication is nice, you can have a snapshot for each week of the past year without crazy storage cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735069)) "the cloud service doesn't know about what I send, it's just encrypted blobs as far as it is concerned" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763514)) "It works perfectly, it is client-side encrypted with easily-configurable retention policies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777182))
- Scriptable CLI with predictable behavior (5 comments): "Use tools with straightforward, predictable semantics, like rclone, or synching, or restic/Borg." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766540)) "We tested both and used Restic precisely because it was better in CLI/scripting department" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49751568)) "I keep my backup job as simple as just running restic with some systemd restrictions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735093))
- Works with many cloud and local storage (4 comments): "We just use restic with B2 and some local S3 servers rather than relying on proprietary solutions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768811)) "I use backblaze with restic. Got about 300GB up there, fully encrypted, keys in 1Password." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016872)) "Restic + rclone personally, with a wrapper script to glue things together nicely" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764851))
- Restores verified and reliable (3 comments): "I still trust restic checksums will actually check whether restore is correct" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768864)) "Restic backups helped me several times in cases of catastrophic failures" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860717)) "I tested restoring my restic backups to the same PC and it worked." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664770))

## What people warn about

- Setup is fiddly and error-prone (4 comments): "needing to provide a remote + a separate set of env vars to authenticate with that remote" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772613)) "something just goes wrong somewhere on this seemingly simple task" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097625)) "this later one is tricky to set up properly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915797))
- Complex for non-technical users (2 comments): "Restic is fantastic. And restic is complicated for someone who is not technical." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598935)) "restic and kopia should work decently, if with a bit of setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849525))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "restic", https://hackerapproved.com/p/restic/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).