2y ago

Anyone using rustic?

GitHub - rustic-rs/rustic: rustic - fast, encrypted, and deduplicated backups powered by Rust

Hey, you probably know about restic and borg for backups. They are pretty mature and very commonly used.

Rustic is a fully compatible reimplementation of restic in Rust and they do seem to have implemented a few improvements over restic. The developer even used to be a contributor on restic.

Is anyone here using it already? It looks super promising but I'd love to hear your opinion!

Rust @programming.dev

Pantherina @feddit.de

1y ago

Rustic: Encrypted & Deduplicated Backups compatible with Restic

github.com /rustic-rs/rustic

28 comments

Q. How do you know an open source project is written in Rust?
A. Don't worry, they'll tell you.
- Imagine a world where all these rust devs would write new software instead of manically reimplementing existing software in rust...
  
  Imagine a world where we're all using 30 year old software because it "still kinda works".
  
  Aren't most CVEs out of bounds writes/reads?
  Rust helps prevent that, so more secure software seems like a good thing
  So long as they don't abuse unsafe that is
What is the advantage of using this over restic?
- They have a page in the repo describing some advantages https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic/blob/main/docs/comparison-restic.md
  
  It sounds like they have some nice improvements, but I wonder why they didn't contribute them back to the original restic project.
  I also wouldn't rely on an immature piece of software to handle backups - you want to avoid as many risk factors as possible with backups, since when you need to restore you really need it to work.
  
  FYI, you formated your link wrong, it should be [here](https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic/blob/main/docs/comparison-restic.md)
- Looks like the rust-cult is at it again rewriting existing stuff for no gain but pushing rust on others.
  
  A lot of the time, rust rewrites are more for devs, than users. Rust code is just easier to maintain (in the long-run 😉 and harder to make buggy. But some times the apps do just run faster when compiled with Rust.
  
  Use fd instead of find, or rg instead of grep and tell me there's no gain. The speed increase alone is astounding, and beyond worth it.
Wow, people in this thread really have strong opinions about other people writing similar programs in different languages. Who cares? Why is more choice a bad thing?
I use restic extensively, and it works really really well... until it breaks. Then there's next-to-nothing you can do to fix the repo.
Rustic, on the other hand, has lock-less design, and repair options, so I end up using it to fix things. However, it has a number of rough edges: it uses its own wacky config file, its include/exclude options are wildly different and a bit painful, and to use a bunch of repo backends (like S3), you need to install, configure, and use rclone, which is poorly documented by rustic.
Oh great, another project named "rustic". There's also a wrapper for Restic called Rustic, also written in Rust. No activity in the repo for 3 years, though.
I liked the config file support in the old Rustic, and seeing the same thing in the new one does at least attract me a bit.
But a Rust rewrite of a software written in Go, a language that is already pretty efficient? I don't understand why.
What's the advantage of this over
sudo tar -czvf /backupFile.tar.gz folder/to/backup/ gpg -o backupFile.tar.gz.gpg --symmetric backupFile.tar.gz
- Less storage space (since you don't duplicate the data that has not been changed since the last backup), and ability to check different versions / restore / rollback.
- Mostly it comes down to data types, disk space, and restores. Even if you're doing incremental backups with tar it isn't as fast, space efficient, or easy to restore, (in most cases) as something like restic, borg, etc..
  I have found when you just need something simple that just works everywhere then its hard to beat tar!

28 comments