May I ask who is it that has made this? Looking through the website and twitter but unable to find any humans attached to the project. I do appreciate how it says a human will read a response to any of their automated emails.
Hey HN! I started working on this after my old cloud backup service (CrashPlan) announced they were discontinuing their Home product. My cofounder Cory and I built this to meet our own needs, and also for our families to use, most of whom are non-technical. We're working really hard to make Relica the best backup solution for a broad range of consumers, from everyday users to more technical professionals with specific needs. Besides ourselves, my mother and my brother are among Relica's first users.
We're really excited to share the beginning of our product! I'm personally a bit terrified, too. :) We have a lot of great features planned, besides the ones we've already implemented. (Coming soon: back up to your own cloud destinations such as your own S3 account or SFTP destinations.)
Feel free to sign up, give it a spin, share your referral link with others to get discounts, and let us know what you think!
Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete? This is all I want in a backup service. Install on all my devices (this must include mobile devices too), send everything I care about to as many destinations as I provide, all of which I manage myself.
As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out. If I can just have it in my own S3 bucket, I can do absolutely anything I like with my files. Count me as very interested if this is where you're going.
Also, trust and security are going to be huge. How do I know you're not going to leak and / or abuse the depth of access you get by owning my backups?
> Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?
If you edit your backup, you can create a custom hook (https://relicabackup.com/docs/backup-hooks). We plan to implement email notifications when such events occur as well.
> As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out.
We're implementing "Bring your own cloud" now, so you can provide your own S3-compatible, SFTP, Azure, or Google storage (more to come). This feature is almost done.
> Also, trust and security are going to be huge.
Backups are encrypted on the client, and the key is kept on your local device (don't lose it!). We can't access your data, and even your file selection is encrypted.
It seems to me that the "Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?" actually implied if there's a way to get notified when the "Bring your own cloud" feature is complete and in production so that we can give your service a test then.
If I guessed that wrong, then anyway please answer because I want to know that too. Thanks!
Oh. :) That makes sense. We're in the process of setting up a mailing list - in the meantime, can you drop us a quick email at support@relicabackup.com and we'll make sure to send you a notification when this feature is ready?
As long as your backup isn't stored on the same device that died -- i.e. if you have access to the destination/repository -- you can restore by accessing it with the encryption password (which only you know).
The actual key is stored at the destination inside the repository, encrypted by a password that you have to enter (doesn't matter the device). So don't lose the password. Technically there are a few keys in play: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/100_references.html#...
Anyway, if you know your encryption password, you can perform a restore from any device with access to the destination.
If you do it as a docker container, then I should be able to load that on my Synology NAS, which would make me and my wife (and the rest of my family) very happy!
Thanks - I'm kinda surprised to hear that feedback, since I made it myself real quick as a holdover while we launched... we have plans to fill it out a little more.
The pages will all be revamped, but now we'll focus on keeping it simple.
(I make all my sites without templates/themes -- from-scratch HTML in an editor, because that's what I'm used to... it doesn't take very long and I know 100% what's going on as I make it. My cofounder Cory is more of the front-end guru though so we'll use the best tools between what we know!)
Your website is an example of what good web design should look like. It's fast, clean, doesn't load extraneous crap and almost all of it works without JavaScript (which I block by default). Most "Show HN" posts I open and close immediately when I see (or, often enough, don't see anything at all) their website. Instead, you have a new trial subscriber.
This is very off-topic, but if you ever feel like sharing your web development process in a blog post (or any other medium), describing how you stay productive doing a website from scratch, I'd love to read and share it. There is a real shortage of modern web development material that doesn't start with "download bloated framework X along with Y different tools for no particular reason".
You can get a long way with a static site generator (hugo, jekyll, etc) and SASS (and optionally a minimal framework like inuit.css which mainly deals with keeping your padding/margins/line-heights consistent).
I don't understand what the base price is supposed to cover... Why would I pay you $60/year to back up my files to thumb drives and friends' computers?
That's the membership subscription: unlimited backups to local and remote (meaning "peer" or other computers) destinations, automatic software updates, and for as many devices as you have. Some backup services (especially those with unlimited offerings) limit you to just one or two computers.
And your membership subscription can become free if you refer others each year (they also get a discount). 3 referrals per year will keep your membership totally free.
”Why would I pay you $60/year to back up my files to thumb drives and friends' computers?”
Isn’t that kinda obvious? What you pay for is the ability for the developers to continue refining the application and keep adding useful features. Sounds reasonable to me at least.
But it also leaves you susceptible to potential pivots in the business plan if the developers decide that base fee isn't enough or isn't generating enough income. The benefit to an ownership model in this case, particularly with "bring your own cloud" is that at least you have some immunity if the developers stop refining the application.
This is more than just a hypothetical. One of the mentioned reasons for this application was the shutdown of CrashPlan for home users. Using a similar monthly fee plan doesn't show any more resilience than the service they are trying to replace. What's the likelihood that the same market realities that pushed CrashPlan to shut down such services don't also impact them?
More personally anecdotally, I bought a "bring your own cloud" multi-cloud backup tool many years ago. I still use it, even through several terrible pivots, because the core software has been stable/consistent/well-enough maintained at the time. They were bought by a cloud provider and dropped "bring your own cloud" and "multi-cloud" from their main focused products. They spun back out and are trying to be business-focused SaaS-only similar to CrashPlan's recent pivot. Neither of those pivots have been to my advantage, but again, for now, the original desktop application I bought all those years ago still works great. Had I opted for one of the more monthly paid SaaS products in either of those pivots, I would have been much worse off with each pivot.
Unfortunately, there's also no way that I can recommend people buy a product like mine because they no longer sell it in that manner (and haven't in years), and it's incredibly tough to avoid the SaaS business model in the backup space, but backup is one of the areas where such business models and safety from pivots is extremely important and the SaaS model seems almost to guarantee that pivots will happen.
We hear ya. We were bit the very example you mentioned, so to prevent that with our service:
1) We are currently adding a "bring your own cloud" feature to Relica -- in fact, it's already done, just undocumented while we finish up the UI for it.
2) Relica uses restic for the actual archival operations, so your restores can be performed with an independent, reliable, well-maintained, MIT-licensed open source tool.
I'm really interested in this. I liked and used CrashPlan for some time but have had a sub-par backup setup since they shuttered their home-user business.
Yes, we've been making contributions to restic for some time because we have been very happy with restic's stability, capabilities, and cross-platform support. In fact, the initial plan was to "just" create a web UI for restic, but then we decided to bring it full circle and make it a consumer product so that our families and friends could migrate off their backup service which was being discontinued.
Notable competitor: Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/). Part of the reason I prefer Arq is that there's no monthly fees on the tool itself. I own my backup data wherever I choose to send it to (S3, Google Cloud, etc).
Yes! Arq was one part of inspiration for Relica. However, we wanted something more accessible for our non-technical family members.
Also, Relica can back up to multiple cloud services with just a single upload of your data, whereas I believe with Arq it's one upload per cloud destination, lending itself to up to 5x faster backups. This is through our Relica Cloud destination which is optional for all users.
Relica technically already supports "bring your own cloud" (your own S3, Google Cloud, SFTP, etc - many others) but is still undocumented as we finish its implementation in the UI.
And your Relica membership can be made essentially free if you refer just a few people each year.
I'd love to know more about this too (I'm the lead developer on Arq). Please email support@arqbackup.com with details if you don't want to post here.
Thank you!
OK. I found your email from Sep 2017, using Arq 4 and Amazon Cloud Drive. There was a problem with Arq deleting more old backup records than you expected, but without more information about what had happened in the previous year I couldn't figure out why it wasn't doing what you expected.
This is made by Matt Holt, a talented but anti-lgbt software engineer. If you're like me and like to put your money where your values are then please carefully consider this.
I want to be clear, I have nothing against his work, technically he does great stuff, especially in the Go community. However, I can't in good faith support a company he's building when I feel confident that he will be reinforcing the structure which harms minorities (of all kinds) in tech.
If you consider my analysis of his responses to be unfair, keep in mind that Matt is an active member of The Church of Latter-day Saints. The LDS church does not explicitly ban LGBT members, however it does ban sex outside of marriage and only acknowledges opposite-sex marriages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_The_Church_o...).
EDIT: You drastically edited your comment; see my addendum at the end.
Alright, I only barely remember this, but let's break this down anyway, because this is 1) mostly false, 2) obviously very important to you, and I'm sorry but I don't know who you are so you will have to help me understand where you're coming from, and 3) way more dramatic than it really was.
I complained once on Twitter about a particular instance of technical tooling being modified to align with certain societal/political viewpoints, which I found distracting from the purpose of the tool. In this case, it temporarily lowered my productivity (requiring me to click and scroll back through to view previous terminal output, which was not required before).
The tweet made no mention of which service was being referenced, nor did it make any reference at all to the type of issue or topic that the tool was vocal about. The point of the tweet had nothing to do with the issue itself, but it was a complaint about a UX issue I had with a technical tool.
When asked for more details by another commenter, I replied that I refused to give more information since I didn't want to start an argument: again, the point was not the specific topic of the message.
> When I confronted him, he said he didn't think companies should "get political" and claimed he didn't have anything against Pride,
At no point did you confront me, @abeisgreat. Instead, you replied to the other commenter assuming to know my heart on the matter and made claims about my opinions and feelings and background that are simply untrue -- claims which I had never made myself, nor could you substantiate except through extrapolation, mincing my words, or taking them out of context.
This comment thread here on HN is continuing that trend. That all happened several months ago. Are you really still convinced that your self-assumed attitudes against me are correct? You never even bothered to ask me what I was talking about, or what my feelings on the matter really are.
> but was annoyed with it impacting his work - which seems suspicious because he is definitely Mormon and very conservative.
I don't know what my work ethic has to do with being "Mormon" (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) or "conservative" (yes, I tend to be more conservative).
> he will be reinforcing the structure which harms minorities (of all kinds) in tech.
You forget too that I am a minority in tech myself. The last thing I have is any feelings of enmity or bias against others who also feel they are on the outside or have non-conforming beliefs or values. After all, that's my whole life. You think being a practicing Latter-day Saint in the wildly-liberal and "progressive" tech community these days is easy? that every other person shares my core beliefs? that everyone appreciates and understands my choice of lifestyle?
I am not that much different from you... I don't know why you choose to hold this grudge against me, or why you read so much into so little, but next time, let's talk about it rather than draw conclusions.
EDIT: My addendum, in light of significant edits to the original comment.
> If you consider my analysis of his responses to be unfair, keep in mind that Matt is an active member of The Church of Latter-day Saints. The LDS church does not explicitly ban LGBT members, however it does ban sex outside of marriage and only acknowledges opposite-sex marriages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_The_Church_o...).
I'm glad you brought this up. Like you, I'm proud of the way I live, which is as an active member of Jesus Christ's Church. Ask me anything. (Also, check out https://mormonandgay.lds.org/ -- a great resource ...
I appreciate the response and I'm really sorry if you feel like this is a personal attack and I do apologize for the edit. I only did that to remove as much speculation on my part as I could so that others could make their own judgement.
You are right that I made assumptions about your views based on your tweet and your previous tweets, if you can tell me that you strongly support equal LGBT rights and freedoms than I'll concede that I was mistaken.
If that's not the case, then I stand by my original point, which is not that you should not be supported, but that people should understand who they're supporting and make their own judgement.
> if you can tell me that you strongly support equal LGBT rights and freedoms
I do. Of course I do. The freedom to choose is one of my most important tenets. I am opposed to taking that freedom away from law-abiding individuals.
I may not agree with or condone everyone's choices or lifestyles -- just as they may not agree with mine -- but that is the point of having freedom (and/or moral agency, whatever you want to call it).
You are allowed to campaign for what you believe in: you can tell people to stay away from our company because I'm a part of it, but there are people who will disagree with you, too. It's just how it goes. There's always somebody who will disagree, somebody who will not support your own agenda. I spent two years of my life -- 24/7, in a place I had never been before nor been since -- trying to teach people what I believe and to convince them to change their lives. It's hard. Ask any missionary, ask any activist. People sometimes just aren't ready to agree, or aren't in a place to understand such that they CAN feasibly agree.
Sorry that you have (had?) to feel a bit divided by what you and I believe. Hopefully the next time you meet a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you can confidently smile knowing that you have a friend in them.
hey matt, really love caddy server and this new service you created but one question, since you are using an open source backup tool which is restic, would you be willing to open source the web ui for the restic community? so others can self host or even be able to use restic alot easier? i love using restic but i think having an open source web ui would be nice to have.
I'm a little skeptical though -- I think the devil is in the details. It's a lot of work to make a highly reliable backup program. As a Windows user, here's a list of questions I'd ask:
1. Does Relica work with OneDrive on-demand files? [1]
2. Does Relica work with WSL files? [2]
Supporting all these corner cases on Windows, Mac, and Linux will be a TON of work.
Thanks for bringing up the hard questions. We have not yet made special considerations for OneDrive on-demand files or WSL files. Indeed, they require a lot of work. (I've been learning that, I think, Windows has a lot more edge cases than Linux does, in general... Windows has definitely been more difficult to develop for.)
So yeah, it's a lot of work. I know that there are major performance and correctness issues when dealing with OneDrive mounted storage and the equivalent for other sync services. Still, I've added your feedback to our list. Thanks!
Very interesting project which I will be following. Linux user here who had to roll my own after CrashPlan. I went with Duplicati and Backblaze because the combo was cheap and had a web/linux client. Could I recommend allowing Backblaze for storage since its cheaper then S3? It looks like restic already supports B2.
We do give credit in the licenses file. The reason we don't mention it on the site yet is because Relica currently ships with rclone but we do not use it, yet. We will be using it once we flip the switch to activate some new features soon!
We've also made a few contributions to rclone and restic so all the work we do on open source projects is available upstream to the main project's users.
Amazing that you're doing this! I've been looking for something new for a while.
How well does this work for developers? I had to stop using Dropbox because NPM/Yarn seems to do too many symlinks for Dropbox to understand and it never stopped syncing.
I then tried to switch to Google Drive backup but THEIR BACKUP + SYNC APP KILLS MY MACHINE because it's a huge memory hog. I have to kill it/restart ever since going there so now I'm looking to get off of this Google Monster.
I'd be excited to try your service but would love an answer to the above! Also, how does restore work? Your FAQ/docs are pretty light on screenshots of the actual software.
Thanks for the comments! As you can see why, we don't recommend using file sync software for backups. Relica can handle symlinks just fine: it preserves them, not follows them.
Restore works well also, it just runs in the background. Pretty simple right now, but we're actively participating in contributing to restic to make restores more interactive in the sense of progress reporting. We are not focusing on screenshots right now so we can revamp the UI, and we have some good ideas for restores, so you'll see it changing here in the next few months.
Anyway, we'd love for you to give it a try! Feel free to email us with any other feedback.
Let's say my entire computer is lost or stolen. What's the best way to restore? Can I restore my entire disk image? Or does Relica just backup individual files, meaning I'd have to repopuplate my environment, then use Relica to bring back files? Does Relica use one directory like Dropbox by default or does it backup my whole machine?
Good questions. I should add some of these to our FAQ.
Relica does file backup, not disk imaging -- for various reasons. So you'll install Relica and restore the files either on your new computer, or just log into the website (without needing to install Relica) and download a restore file --- that web restore feature is coming soon; we just got it working in dev last week. :)
You can back up all the files your user has access to with Relica. You can actually run it as root (on Linux) but we need to write a how-to for that, since it unfortunately requires disabling automatic upgrades for now. We'll work on making it more flexible for these use cases once we've got the basics more covered.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadEDIT: https://www.lightcodelabs.com/ lists a second person
We're really excited to share the beginning of our product! I'm personally a bit terrified, too. :) We have a lot of great features planned, besides the ones we've already implemented. (Coming soon: back up to your own cloud destinations such as your own S3 account or SFTP destinations.)
Feel free to sign up, give it a spin, share your referral link with others to get discounts, and let us know what you think!
As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out. If I can just have it in my own S3 bucket, I can do absolutely anything I like with my files. Count me as very interested if this is where you're going.
Also, trust and security are going to be huge. How do I know you're not going to leak and / or abuse the depth of access you get by owning my backups?
> Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?
If you edit your backup, you can create a custom hook (https://relicabackup.com/docs/backup-hooks). We plan to implement email notifications when such events occur as well.
> As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out.
We're implementing "Bring your own cloud" now, so you can provide your own S3-compatible, SFTP, Azure, or Google storage (more to come). This feature is almost done.
> Also, trust and security are going to be huge.
Backups are encrypted on the client, and the key is kept on your local device (don't lose it!). We can't access your data, and even your file selection is encrypted.
If I guessed that wrong, then anyway please answer because I want to know that too. Thanks!
Question: if the encryption key is kept on the device, how can I access data from another device?
Anyway, if you know your encryption password, you can perform a restore from any device with access to the destination.
I feel the firmware of those proprietary firmwares have been insecure and slow and non-cross platform compatible.
The pages will all be revamped, but now we'll focus on keeping it simple.
(I make all my sites without templates/themes -- from-scratch HTML in an editor, because that's what I'm used to... it doesn't take very long and I know 100% what's going on as I make it. My cofounder Cory is more of the front-end guru though so we'll use the best tools between what we know!)
Just a thought. :)
And your membership subscription can become free if you refer others each year (they also get a discount). 3 referrals per year will keep your membership totally free.
Isn’t that kinda obvious? What you pay for is the ability for the developers to continue refining the application and keep adding useful features. Sounds reasonable to me at least.
This is more than just a hypothetical. One of the mentioned reasons for this application was the shutdown of CrashPlan for home users. Using a similar monthly fee plan doesn't show any more resilience than the service they are trying to replace. What's the likelihood that the same market realities that pushed CrashPlan to shut down such services don't also impact them?
More personally anecdotally, I bought a "bring your own cloud" multi-cloud backup tool many years ago. I still use it, even through several terrible pivots, because the core software has been stable/consistent/well-enough maintained at the time. They were bought by a cloud provider and dropped "bring your own cloud" and "multi-cloud" from their main focused products. They spun back out and are trying to be business-focused SaaS-only similar to CrashPlan's recent pivot. Neither of those pivots have been to my advantage, but again, for now, the original desktop application I bought all those years ago still works great. Had I opted for one of the more monthly paid SaaS products in either of those pivots, I would have been much worse off with each pivot.
Unfortunately, there's also no way that I can recommend people buy a product like mine because they no longer sell it in that manner (and haven't in years), and it's incredibly tough to avoid the SaaS business model in the backup space, but backup is one of the areas where such business models and safety from pivots is extremely important and the SaaS model seems almost to guarantee that pivots will happen.
1) We are currently adding a "bring your own cloud" feature to Relica -- in fact, it's already done, just undocumented while we finish up the UI for it.
2) Relica uses restic for the actual archival operations, so your restores can be performed with an independent, reliable, well-maintained, MIT-licensed open source tool.
It seems like a pretty safe bet then, that this is a web interface on top of restic.
Also, Relica can back up to multiple cloud services with just a single upload of your data, whereas I believe with Arq it's one upload per cloud destination, lending itself to up to 5x faster backups. This is through our Relica Cloud destination which is optional for all users.
Relica technically already supports "bring your own cloud" (your own S3, Google Cloud, SFTP, etc - many others) but is still undocumented as we finish its implementation in the UI.
And your Relica membership can be made essentially free if you refer just a few people each year.
I want to be clear, I have nothing against his work, technically he does great stuff, especially in the Go community. However, I can't in good faith support a company he's building when I feel confident that he will be reinforcing the structure which harms minorities (of all kinds) in tech.
If you consider my analysis of his responses to be unfair, keep in mind that Matt is an active member of The Church of Latter-day Saints. The LDS church does not explicitly ban LGBT members, however it does ban sex outside of marriage and only acknowledges opposite-sex marriages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_The_Church_o...).
Alright, I only barely remember this, but let's break this down anyway, because this is 1) mostly false, 2) obviously very important to you, and I'm sorry but I don't know who you are so you will have to help me understand where you're coming from, and 3) way more dramatic than it really was.
I complained once on Twitter about a particular instance of technical tooling being modified to align with certain societal/political viewpoints, which I found distracting from the purpose of the tool. In this case, it temporarily lowered my productivity (requiring me to click and scroll back through to view previous terminal output, which was not required before).
The tweet made no mention of which service was being referenced, nor did it make any reference at all to the type of issue or topic that the tool was vocal about. The point of the tweet had nothing to do with the issue itself, but it was a complaint about a UX issue I had with a technical tool.
When asked for more details by another commenter, I replied that I refused to give more information since I didn't want to start an argument: again, the point was not the specific topic of the message.
> When I confronted him, he said he didn't think companies should "get political" and claimed he didn't have anything against Pride,
At no point did you confront me, @abeisgreat. Instead, you replied to the other commenter assuming to know my heart on the matter and made claims about my opinions and feelings and background that are simply untrue -- claims which I had never made myself, nor could you substantiate except through extrapolation, mincing my words, or taking them out of context.
This comment thread here on HN is continuing that trend. That all happened several months ago. Are you really still convinced that your self-assumed attitudes against me are correct? You never even bothered to ask me what I was talking about, or what my feelings on the matter really are.
> but was annoyed with it impacting his work - which seems suspicious because he is definitely Mormon and very conservative.
I don't know what my work ethic has to do with being "Mormon" (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) or "conservative" (yes, I tend to be more conservative).
> he will be reinforcing the structure which harms minorities (of all kinds) in tech.
You forget too that I am a minority in tech myself. The last thing I have is any feelings of enmity or bias against others who also feel they are on the outside or have non-conforming beliefs or values. After all, that's my whole life. You think being a practicing Latter-day Saint in the wildly-liberal and "progressive" tech community these days is easy? that every other person shares my core beliefs? that everyone appreciates and understands my choice of lifestyle?
I am not that much different from you... I don't know why you choose to hold this grudge against me, or why you read so much into so little, but next time, let's talk about it rather than draw conclusions.
EDIT: My addendum, in light of significant edits to the original comment.
> If you consider my analysis of his responses to be unfair, keep in mind that Matt is an active member of The Church of Latter-day Saints. The LDS church does not explicitly ban LGBT members, however it does ban sex outside of marriage and only acknowledges opposite-sex marriages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_The_Church_o...).
I'm glad you brought this up. Like you, I'm proud of the way I live, which is as an active member of Jesus Christ's Church. Ask me anything. (Also, check out https://mormonandgay.lds.org/ -- a great resource ...
I appreciate the response and I'm really sorry if you feel like this is a personal attack and I do apologize for the edit. I only did that to remove as much speculation on my part as I could so that others could make their own judgement.
You are right that I made assumptions about your views based on your tweet and your previous tweets, if you can tell me that you strongly support equal LGBT rights and freedoms than I'll concede that I was mistaken.
If that's not the case, then I stand by my original point, which is not that you should not be supported, but that people should understand who they're supporting and make their own judgement.
> if you can tell me that you strongly support equal LGBT rights and freedoms
I do. Of course I do. The freedom to choose is one of my most important tenets. I am opposed to taking that freedom away from law-abiding individuals.
I may not agree with or condone everyone's choices or lifestyles -- just as they may not agree with mine -- but that is the point of having freedom (and/or moral agency, whatever you want to call it).
You are allowed to campaign for what you believe in: you can tell people to stay away from our company because I'm a part of it, but there are people who will disagree with you, too. It's just how it goes. There's always somebody who will disagree, somebody who will not support your own agenda. I spent two years of my life -- 24/7, in a place I had never been before nor been since -- trying to teach people what I believe and to convince them to change their lives. It's hard. Ask any missionary, ask any activist. People sometimes just aren't ready to agree, or aren't in a place to understand such that they CAN feasibly agree.
Sorry that you have (had?) to feel a bit divided by what you and I believe. Hopefully the next time you meet a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you can confidently smile knowing that you have a friend in them.
I know of a couple efforts, either talked about or under way, to make an open source web UI for restic. One is a PR to add a sort of API to restic: https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/1963 -- and another is here: https://gitlab.simbookee.com/andi/restic-gui.git
I'm a little skeptical though -- I think the devil is in the details. It's a lot of work to make a highly reliable backup program. As a Windows user, here's a list of questions I'd ask:
1. Does Relica work with OneDrive on-demand files? [1]
2. Does Relica work with WSL files? [2]
Supporting all these corner cases on Windows, Mac, and Linux will be a TON of work.
[1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/learn-about-onedriv...
[2]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/15/wsl-file-sys...
So yeah, it's a lot of work. I know that there are major performance and correctness issues when dealing with OneDrive mounted storage and the equivalent for other sync services. Still, I've added your feedback to our list. Thanks!
As for NAS integration, that'd be really cool -- I don't really know what is involved to make that happen but it's something we're going to look into!
And although we may not start out with so many, Relica will be able to support about a dozen different backend storage types before the end.
We've also made a few contributions to rclone and restic so all the work we do on open source projects is available upstream to the main project's users.
How well does this work for developers? I had to stop using Dropbox because NPM/Yarn seems to do too many symlinks for Dropbox to understand and it never stopped syncing.
I then tried to switch to Google Drive backup but THEIR BACKUP + SYNC APP KILLS MY MACHINE because it's a huge memory hog. I have to kill it/restart ever since going there so now I'm looking to get off of this Google Monster.
I'd be excited to try your service but would love an answer to the above! Also, how does restore work? Your FAQ/docs are pretty light on screenshots of the actual software.
Good luck!
Restore works well also, it just runs in the background. Pretty simple right now, but we're actively participating in contributing to restic to make restores more interactive in the sense of progress reporting. We are not focusing on screenshots right now so we can revamp the UI, and we have some good ideas for restores, so you'll see it changing here in the next few months.
Anyway, we'd love for you to give it a try! Feel free to email us with any other feedback.
Let's say my entire computer is lost or stolen. What's the best way to restore? Can I restore my entire disk image? Or does Relica just backup individual files, meaning I'd have to repopuplate my environment, then use Relica to bring back files? Does Relica use one directory like Dropbox by default or does it backup my whole machine?
Relica does file backup, not disk imaging -- for various reasons. So you'll install Relica and restore the files either on your new computer, or just log into the website (without needing to install Relica) and download a restore file --- that web restore feature is coming soon; we just got it working in dev last week. :)
You can back up all the files your user has access to with Relica. You can actually run it as root (on Linux) but we need to write a how-to for that, since it unfortunately requires disabling automatic upgrades for now. We'll work on making it more flexible for these use cases once we've got the basics more covered.