Restic also works like this, and has the following benefits over Borg: multiple hosts can back up to the same repo, and it supports "dumb" remote file hosts that aren't running Borg like S3 or plain SFTP servers.
I really like restic, and am personally happy to use it via the command line. It's very fast and efficient! However, I do wish there was better tooling / wrappers around it. I'd love to be able to set something simple up on my partner's Macbook.
For example, Pika Backup, and Vorta are popular UIs for Borg of which no equivalent exists for Restic, while Borgmatic seems to be a de-facto standard for profile configuration.
For my own purposes, I've been using a script I found on Github[0] for a while, but it only really supports Backblaze B2 AFAIK.[1] I've been meaning to try autorestic[2] and resticprofile[3] as they are potentially more flexible than the script I'm currently using but the fact that there are so many competing tools - many of which are no longer maintained - makes it difficult to choose a specific one.
Prestic[4] looks intriguing for my partner's use, although it seems to have very few users. :\ A fork of Vorta[5] seems to have fizzled out six years ago.
A number of others are findable through the community section of the forum.
Bit of a self plug, I author Backrest. The most significant challenge historically has been that restic has poor programatic interfaces but in recent revisions the JSON API (over stdout) has largely stabilized for most commands.
Thanks - last time I looked at npbackup it didn't support macOS! I'll have her give it a go.
Relica looks neat, but at that point I'd either suggest she uses one of the Borg tools or write a simple wrapper for her to trigger backups instead.
edit: Still looks a bit hairy for an average user to install currently, and the maintainer writes "I'm not planning on full macos support since I don't own any mac" - https://github.com/netinvent/npbackup/issues/28
I would recommend kopia, which afaik has a similar feature set approach and a very easy to use gui. I recently used it to convert my 10 year old backups into one store. Dedup worked great.
I'm a huge fan of restic as well. My only complaint is performance and memory usage. I'm looking forward to being able to use Rustic: https://rustic.cli.rs/
> The operations are robustly designed and can be safely aborted and efficiently resumed.
This is great, when you do your first restic backup on a machine it uploads all the data which takes a long time and if there is the tiniest interruption (like computer going to sleep) then you have to start from zero again, at least that's the experience I had. Instead I went via excluding the biggest directories and then removing them from the exclusion list one by one, doing backup runs in between.
Can someone clarify if Restic dedups and compresses encrypted repos like Borg does? I feel like at some point it couldn't but maybe read that it now can?
I ask because my Borg repo is an order of magnitude smaller because of dedup, so it's essential for me.
