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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

Are there any reasons to prefer Restic over BorgBackup[1]?

A conclusion from one comparison (2017)[2]:

"Restic’s memory requirements makes it unsuitable for backing up a small VPS with limited RAM, and the slow backup verification process makes it impractical on larger servers. But if you are backing up desktop or laptop computers then this may not matter so much, and using Restic means that you don’t have to setup your own storage server."

Is this still true?

[1] https://www.borgbackup.org/

[2] https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/

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For remote backups, BorgBackup always needs to run a server process (usually over SSH). Restic works with a "dumb" storage that only provides get/put/list/delete operations. Therefore restic is way easier to set up with built in support for S3, B2, GCS, and similar services that only offer an API but not shell access.

That's true, although there are now a handful of BorgBackup remote storage vendors (rsync.net, BorgBase, etc.) that you can pay to run the server-side hosting for you. Probably not nearly as cheap as, say, S3.. but it does get closer to "just point your client here and hit go". And they offer additional sauce on top that you'd have to roll yourself with S3.. Backup activity monitoring, etc.

Thanks for the mention. BorgBase.com author here.

We're not as cheap as S3 Deep Glacier, but cheaper than standard storage and the same price as B2 and Wasabi, if you get the large plan. So not that much difference to "dumber" storage.

Storage is either RAID6 or Ceph.

If you can use something like samba or any other way of attaching a remote folder, Borg will work without SSH access. So you can also use Borg if you for example mount a Google Drive folder and use that as your repository. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Borgbackup is a fantastic piece of software. I've used it to backup so many different things over SSH, and it's always worked perfectly.

I'm still convinced that its dedupe is magical. I don't know if there's a backup app that is more frugal with disk space, but Borgbackup has served me well in a non-growing 1.5TB backup area for 3+ years now.

They split larger files into segments and only back up new segments. This avoids a) uploading files it has seen before and b) re-uploading large files if only part of it has changed.

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