The restic project turns four!

Four years ago on 2014-04-06 fd0 added the first commit to what would later become the restic repository. At the time it was code-named khepri, but unfortunately the name wasn’t available on GitHub any more, so we had to find a different one.

At the moment, restic’s repository was starred on GitHub almost four thousand times. And we’ve collected 56 other backup tools along the way, helping countless people to discover backup programs (not necessarily restic alone). These two facts alone prove that it was worth it: More people were able to setup easy, effortless backups which they can depend upon.

We’ve seen quite a few milestones in restic’s development, most recently the introduction of the local metadata cache in 0.8.0 in November 2017, which sped up many operations. We continue to improve support for our various backends, the last one was the rclone backend which will be included in the next release and allows using rclone, a versatile cloud syncing tool, for storing backups on a variety of cloud-based backends.

If you like restic, and you’d like development to continue, send some nice words to the developers! Either use the SayThanks service¹, or add a comment below via the forum! It’s always very encouraging to hear how restic helps users.

Last, we’d like to thank our many contributors! They are not only working on the code, but also on the documentation, the website, help with issue triage, and provide helpful comments in code reviews. You are awesome, thank you very much!

[1] The SayThanks service is deprecated (2020-10-06)