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Comment by carderne | Hacker News Reader

Enjoyed the post, thanks. One question: why don’t you use restic+rclone on macOS? They both support it and I’d assume you could simplify your system a bit…

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I only have one macOS system (a Mac Mini) and Arq works well for me. Also I prefer to use Time Machine for the local backups (to a USB3 SSD) on macOS since Apple gives Time Machine all sorts of special treatment in the OS, especially when it comes time to do a hardware upgrade.

I’ve also found Arq to be brilliant on MacOS. It’s especially nice on laptops, where you can e.g. set it to pause on battery and during working hours. Also, APFS snapshots is a nice thing given how many Mac apps use SQLite databases under the hood (Photos, Notes, Mail, etc.).

On Linux, the system I liked best was rsnapshot: I love its brutal simplicity (cron + rsync + hardlinks), and how easy it is to browse previous snapshots (each snapshot is a real folder with real files, so you can e.g. ripgrep through a date range). But when my backups grew larger I eventually moved to Borg to get better deduplication + encryption.

rsnapshot was definitely my favorite Linux option before restic. I find that restic gives me the benefits of chunk-based deduplication and encryption, but via `restic find` and `restic mount` I can also get many of the benefits of rsnapshot's simplicity. If you use `restic mount` against a local repo on a USB3 SSD, the FUSE filesystem is actually pretty fast.

Thanks for the info, I’ll have a closer look at Restic then. Borg also has a FUSE interface, but last time I tried it I found it abysmally slow – much slower than just restoring a folder to disk and then grepping through it. I used a Raspberry Pi as my backup server though, so the FUSE was perhaps CPU bound on my system.

Yea, I don't want to oversell it. The restic FUSE mount isn't anywhere near "native" performance. But, it's fast enough that if you can narrow your search to a directory, and if you're using a local restic repo, using grep and similar tools is do-able. To me, using `restic mount` over a USB3 SSD repo makes the mount folder feel sorta like a USB2 filesystem rather than a USB3 one.

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