Backup

Restic37.0k★

Restic backs up your files encrypted and deduplicated to almost anywhere: a local disk, an SFTP server, Amazon S3 or any S3-compatible store, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, or dozens more through rclone. It's one binary for Linux, macOS and Windows, free under the BSD 2-Clause license, with no paid tier and no hosted version. Setup is restic init then restic backup, and after the first run only the changed parts of files get uploaded. Encryption happens before data leaves your machine, so the storage provider sees only ciphertext. Scheduling is on you: cron or systemd timers, plus Healthchecks.io or similar to tell you when a run fails. Backrest wraps it in a web UI with schedules and notifications; Kopia is the alternative with its own GUI. Your only bill is storage. Backblaze B2 starts at $6.95/TB/month, so 500 GB runs about $3.50. Solo through large teams: free, just budget for storage and a restore drill. The catch: lose the repository password and the backup is gone, no recovery, as the README warns. Restic is also still pre-1.0 after twelve years, and its formal compatibility guarantee only starts at 1.0, though the maintainers work hard to keep old repositories readable.

ArchiveBox29.0k★

ArchiveBox saves web pages so they still exist after the internet forgets them. Feed it URLs, bookmarks, browser history or an RSS feed, and it stores each page several ways: original HTML, a single-file copy, screenshot, PDF, WARC (the format the Internet Archive uses) and the article text. It grabs video with yt-dlp and clones git repos too. MIT, run as a nonprofit. Everything lands as ordinary files and folders plus a SQLite index, so your archive outlives the tool. Run it in Docker with a web UI, from the CLI, or feed it from the browser extension. Headless Chrome does the heavy capture work, so budget disk and RAM. There's no paid hosted version; the project points to third-party hosts like PikaPods and Elestio if you'd rather not run it. Researchers, journalists, anyone who cites web sources, or a team that needs proof of what a page said on a given day: use it. For read-it-later with light archiving, a bookmark manager like Linkwarden is simpler. The catch is churn. The 0.9 line spent about two years in release candidates, went stable in late September 2026, and shipped four point releases in its first week. Pin your version.

Duplicati15.2k★

Duplicati backs up your files to any cloud storage (S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP) with encryption, compression, and scheduling through a web UI. It's a set-and-forget backup tool that encrypts everything before it leaves your machine. C#. AES-256 encryption by default, block-level deduplication (only uploads changed chunks), compression, and retention policies. The web UI lets you configure backup jobs, monitor progress, and restore files without touching the command line. Fully free. No paid tier, no premium features. Every backend, every encryption option, every scheduling feature: $0. You pay your cloud storage provider, not Duplicati. Solo: set up a backup to Backblaze B2 or Google Drive in 15 minutes. Protects your data for the cost of storage ($0.005/GB on B2). Small teams: works for backing up shared servers. The web UI makes it manageable without sysadmin expertise. Medium and up: Duplicati works but enterprise backup solutions (Veeam, Restic + orchestration) offer better fleet management and reporting. The catch: the project has had long periods between stable releases. The 2.x line was in beta for years. Performance with very large backup sets (10TB+) can be slow, and the database that tracks file states occasionally corrupts, requiring repair operations. For critical business backups, pair it with monitoring to catch silent failures.

BorgBackup13.9k★

BorgBackup is a deduplicating backup tool for the command line. It deduplicates, meaning if you back up 100GB and only 2GB changed since yesterday, it only stores the 2GB. Over time, that saves enormous amounts of storage. Borg also encrypts by default. Your backups are unreadable without your key. Compression is built in (LZ4, zstd, LZMA). It's been around since 2015, battle-tested, and trusted by sysadmins who don't trust much. Completely free. No paid tier, no cloud service, no strings. You point it at a local drive, a remote server via SSH, or a service like BorgBase ($2/mo for 10GB) or rsync.net ($0.015/GB/mo with Borg support). The catch: Borg is CLI-only. No GUI, no web dashboard. Want scheduled backups? You write a cron job or use Borgmatic (a wrapper that handles scheduling and config). The learning curve is real. The first backup setup takes an hour of reading docs. After that, it just works. Also, Borg 2.0 has been in beta for a long time. If that bothers you, Restic is the modern alternative with a similar approach but more active development.

zerobyte7.3k★

Zerobyte puts a web dashboard on top of Restic, the encrypted, deduplicating backup engine a lot of self-hosters already trust. You pick a source, pick a destination, set a schedule and retention rules, and it runs the jobs and tells you when one fails. AGPL-3.0, free, no paid tier. Setup is one Docker Compose file. Sources can be local folders or NFS, SMB, WebDAV and SFTP shares. Destinations cover local disk, S3-compatible storage, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, and 40+ more through rclone. Mounting remote shares means granting the container SYS_ADMIN and FUSE access, which is a real privilege. Back up only local folders and you can drop both. Homelab and small-team operators tired of cron scripts and silent failures should try it. Restores happen from the UI, alerts go to Slack, Discord, ntfy or email, and OIDC single sign-on is built in. Compare it with Backrest, which does the same Restic-with-a-UI job, and Duplicati if you want a longer track record. The catch is maturity. It is still 0.x and the README warns of major changes between versions. It also tells you not to expose it to the internet, and every org member can operate every repository. Backup software is the last place you want surprises.