A single Bash script, a USB drive, and 30 seconds a day. No cloud. No subscriptions. No excuses.
You have spent months tweaking your Linux environment. The perfect i3 config, the custom kernel parameters, the Docker containers you curated one by one. Then one day — a power surge fries your NVMe. A bad rm -rf. A failed dist-upgrade. And it's all gone.
Most Linux users either don't back up at all, or rely on manual rsync and tar commands they run twice a year. The good news: you can set up fully automated, incremental, encrypted system snapshots with a single script and a USB drive — no cloud subscriptions, no complex configuration, no vendor lock-in.
In this guide I'll show you how to use restic — an open-source backup tool with built-in deduplication, client-side encryption, and snapshot management — paired with a Bash script that handles the real-world edge cases for you: detecting external mounts to avoid wasteful backups, skipping caches that would bloat your repository, and initializing itself on first run.
Why Restic?
