Recipes

Four arrangements that cover most real setups. Each names its backend honestly: the commands are the ones the lab verified; the remote backends are chapter 11's documented-only territory, so build the local shape first and change the address when the local one works.

1. A home folder, nightly, to a USB drive

The smallest setup that deserves the name backup. The password sits in a file only you can read; the scheduler is cron; the script is the whole system:

#!/bin/sh
# nightly-backup.sh — see examples/
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/usb/backups/home-repo
export RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE=$HOME/.restic-password
restic backup --tag nightly $HOME/documents $HOME/photos \
  --exclude-file $HOME/.restic-excludes
restic forget --tag nightly --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --keep-monthly 6
restic check

Run it by hand until it bores you, then let cron run it (15 2 * * *). Two habits make it a system rather than a script: forget without prune nightly, and let a weekly run add restic prune — and treat any non-zero exit as a message to a human, not a line in a log nobody opens.

2. Photographs to a second machine

The family archive to the household server, over SFTP (-r sftp:you@server:/srv/backups/photos), tagged photos, excluded by an excludes file that leaves the camera's sidecar junk behind. Photographs are nearly pure gain for deduplication across folders — the same image filed three ways is stored once — and nearly pure loss for compression; budget the repository at roughly the archive's size plus its annual growth, not at a hopeful ratio. Verify the first big restore by checksum (chapter 8) before deleting anything from anywhere.

3. A small server's data to object storage

Dump first, then back up the dump:

mysqldump --single-transaction myapp > /var/backups/myapp.sql
restic -r s3:my-bucket/myapp backup --tag nightly /var/backups /etc/myapp

The principle is older than restic: back up products (a dump, an export, a closed file), not a live database's working files. The same shape works for any application that can write a consistent export. Object storage's per-request metering argues for fewer, larger runs — nightly, not hourly, unless the data earns it.

4. The rehearsal restore, monthly

Not a backup arrangement: a calendar appointment, for whichever of the above you built. Restore last month's snapshot to a scratch folder, diff -r it or checksum a sample, delete the scratch. Ten minutes, four times a year minimum. Chapter 8 exists so that this recipe is muscle memory rather than research, and the month the rehearsal fails is the month it pays for every previous one.