The Neighbours

Restic is not the only respectable answer, and several neighbours do something it does not. Honest trades, one line each on what would make you choose them instead.

Tool	Shape	Choose it if...
BorgBackup	Deduplicating, encrypted, SSH-first archiver	You live on Linux/macOS, back up to your own servers, and want the older, battle-tested tool; restic's edge is its wider backend and Windows support
Duplicati	Backup with a web interface, to many clouds	You want to click rather than script, and accept a heavier, slower-moving project
rsync + hard links (rsnapshot, hand-rolled)	Snapshot trees of real files	You want backups you can browse with no special tool at all — and accept no encryption and hard-link fragility
rclone	Sync and copy to cloud storage	Moving files is the job; add restic when the job becomes history with encryption (rclone can also serve as a restic backend)
Syncthing / cloud drives	Synchronisation	Both places should simply be the same — knowing deletions sync too (chapter 1's distinction)
Timeshift / system snapshots	Whole-system restore points	The thing you are protecting is the operating system itself, not your files
Vendor cloud backup (Backblaze Personal, iCloud, OneDrive)	Managed, automatic	You value never thinking about it, at subscription price and with the provider holding readable copies (or the keys)

Two confusions worth dissolving. First, Borg versus restic is the real contest in this space, and it is close: both chunk, deduplicate, and encrypt. Borg's repository wants its own server component for best results and historically stayed Unix-only; restic stores to more places with less ceremony and runs natively on Windows. People with strong feelings either way are usually describing which one they learned first. Second, a sync tool plus a recycle bin is not a backup strategy — it has no answer to "the good version was overwritten in March and noticed in June", which is the question snapshots exist to answer.