rustic Documentation

rustic is a fast, encrypted, and deduplicated backup tool. It is a complete new implementation inspired by restic but aims for faster development and more features.

Key compatibility note: rustic reads and writes the identical repository format used by restic. This means you can use restic to verify backups made with rustic and vice versa, allowing you to switch between them without migrating data.

The rustic ecosystem is composed of several specialized crates that provide core functionality, backend support, scheduling, and server implementations. Developers can use these individual crates to build or extend applications within the ecosystem.

Available Crates

• rustic_core: Provides the core functionality for the entire ecosystem.
• rustic_backend: A library designed to support various backends used by rustic and rustic_core.
• rustic_scheduler: Provides scheduling functionality.
• rustic_server: A server implementation that allows rustic to support multiple clients during backup operations.
• rustic_testing: (Not published on crates.io) Provides testing functionality for the ecosystem.

Use Homebrew to install rustic on macOS.

brew install rustic

Use the Scoop package manager to install rustic on Windows.

scoop install rustic

If you have cargo-binstall installed, you can quickly install the rustic-rs binary.

cargo binstall rustic-rs

Configuration files (TOML) can be stored in the user's local config directory (e.g., ~/.config/rustic/) or a global config directory (e.g., /etc/rustic/).

You can specify a custom configuration file using the -P flag followed by the profile name.

Additionally, you can enable environment variable substitution within your configuration files by using the profile-substitute-env option.

Install the stable version of rustic-rs using Cargo.

cargo install --locked rustic-rs

You can install the latest development version directly from the GitHub repository. Warning: This version may be unstable.

cargo install --git https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic.git rustic-rs

You can pull the official rustic image from the GitHub Container Registry.

docker pull ghcr.io/rustic-rs/rustic

The rustic development workflow uses mask to run various tasks. You can install it using cargo.

cargo install mask

The [backup] section defines default settings for all backup operations. These can be overridden in specific [[backup.snapshots]] entries.

Key attributes:

• description: Description for the snapshot.
• exclude-if-present: Array of filenames that, if present, exclude their parent directory.
• git-ignore: If true, uses .gitignore rules.
• globs: Array of globs for inclusion/exclusion.
• label / tags: Metadata for the snapshot.
• skip-if-unchanged: Skip saving if identical to the parent.

Snapshot-specific configuration: Use [[backup.snapshots]] to define specific sources and overrides:

[[backup.snapshots]]
name = "myid"
sources = ["/dir1", "/dir2"]
hooks = { run-before = ["echo test"] }