I use Arq to backup files on my MacBook Pro. But it can feel a bit ‘heavy’ and slow at times. So I looked for other options for my Mac mini and I went with restic.
It uses the CLI – unlike Arq with its GUI.
But to be honest, the GUI of Arq doesn’t do the main thing I want anyway: quickly preview different versions of a file to work out which is the one that I want to restore.1 So it doesn’t make too much of difference that restic lacks a GUI.
I’m impressed by restic thus far. It’s fast, and uses a tiny amount of CPU.
I’m using it to backup my most important files to AWS S3 – with backups being sent to S3 Glacier after a month, so save money.
And my slightly less important media files are backed up to Scaleway Glacier, which only costs £1.66 per TB a month.
And you know what they say, your backups aren’t truly backups until you’ve confirmed you can actually restore data from them.
Well I had to this morning. I made a mistake when doing a git rebase and lost some files. So I ran the restic command and restored the data in seconds. I’m impressed.