Creating backups with Restic and Object Storage

Reviewed on 23 November 2023 • Published on 04 April 2022

restic-backup
restic-s3
backup-s3
object-storage

Restic is a backup tool that allows you to back up your Linux, Windows, Mac or BSD machines and send your backups to repositories via different storage protocols, including S3 (Object Storage).

In this tutorial you learn how to backup a Scaleway Instance running on Ubunutu 20.04 using Restic and Object Storage.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
An SSH key
A valid API key
An Instance running on Ubuntu Focal Fossa (20.04)
Installed and configured the AWS-CLI to use with Scaleway Object Storage
Created an Object Storage bucket

Installing Restic

Connect to your Instance with SSH. In a terminal run:

ssh root@<your_instance_ip>

Update the system and upgrade the software already installed on the Instance.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

Install Restic.

apt-get install restic

Ensure the installation was successful by checking the version.

restic version

Setting up the S3 repository

A repository is the storage space where your backups will be hosted. In this tutorial, we will use Scaleway Object Storage buckets to host our backups.

Set up your environment variables, if you have not done so yet. Replace $SCW_ACCESS_KEY, $SCW_SECRET_KEY by their corresponding values.
```
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$SCW_ACCESS_KEY
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$SCW_SECRET_KEY
```

Initialize the repository using your bucket’s endpoint as a backend. Your bucket endpoint can be found in the Bucket settings tab under Bucket Information.

restic -r s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name> init

Enter a password for the repository and repeat it when prompted.
```
enter password for new repository:
enter password again:
```
Important
The password is required to access the repository. If you lose the password, your data will be irrevocably lost.

Tip
Restic requests you to enter the password every time you perform actions on your repository. If you have configured automatic backups, you might want to set up an environment variable for your password.

An output displays informing the name and path of your repository.

created restic repository da8e38a165 at s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name>

Creating backups

Run the command below to create a backup. Include the path to your repository (in this example, the path is the endpoint of your bucket), and the path of the directory you wish to back up (~/<my-directory> in the example).
```
restic -r s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name> backup ~/<my-directory>
```
The command above creates a snapshot of your directory and sends it to your repository. The snapshot is stored as an object in your bucket.

Tip
By default, the backups you create are stored using STANDARD storage class. If you want to use a different storage class, you can add the -o s3.storage-class=<STORAGE_CLASS> option to your command. For example: restic -r s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name> backup -o s3.storage-class=ONEZONE_IA ~/<my-directory>

Enter the password for the repository when prompted.

enter password for repository:

If the operation is successful, you will see the following output:

repository da8e38a1 opened successfully, password is correct
created new cache in /root/.cache/restic
Files:           1 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:            1 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Added to the repo: 732 B
processed 1 files, 22 B in 0:06
snapshot 15a39fd5 saved

Tip

Restic does not offer a built-in tool for automated backups. Restic recommends using tools like systemd and cron to schedule backup runs. Learn more on the Restic documentation.

Run the following command to verify that the backup was successful:
```
aws s3api list-objects --bucket <bucket_name>
```
Alternatively, you can access your bucket via the Scaleway console. You can find the snapshots of your directory in the /snapshots folder.

Restoring from backups

Retrieve a list of your snapshots to identify the ID of the snapshot you want to restore. Make sure you specify the path to your repository in the command.

restic snapshots -r s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name>
enter password for repository:
repository da8e38a1 opened successfully, password is correct
ID        Time                 Host                Tags        Paths
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15a39fd5  2022-04-06 14:39:25  scw-jovial-keldysh              /root/my-directory
20eed69e  2022-04-06 15:09:01  scw-jovial-keldysh              /root/my-directory
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 snapshots

Run the command below to restore your backup. Specify the path to your repository and to the target directory.

restic -r s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/<bucket_name> restore 15a39fd5 --target ~/<my-directory>

If the operation is successful, you see the following output:

enter password for repository:
repository da8e38a1 opened successfully, password is correct
restoring <Snapshot 15a39fd5 of [/root/my-directory] at 2022-04-06 14:39:25.024340615 +0000 UTC by root@scw-jovial-keldysh> to /root/my-directory

Going further

Refer to the Restic documentation to discover other configuration options and tutorials.