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R

restic

INFRA · APIS
Velocity2.5

Fast, secure and efficient backup program with deduplication

restic.net ↗

A backup tool whose roadmap is correctness, release after release

backupdata-integritycross-platformexit-codesautomationconservative-releases
◆Current state
restic ships roughly two releases a year, and the changelogs are almost entirely fixes ordered by importance. The 0.19 line (June and July 2026) continues that pattern: mount safety, SFTP behavior on Windows servers, exclude handling, and exit-code semantics. New capability appears rarely and narrowly, usually as backend credential support rather than new commands.
◆Where it's heading
The concentration of work is on the platforms where a backup tool is hardest to get right — Windows ACL inheritance and VSS metadata, macOS resource forks and FUSE mounts, SFTP and rclone backends under background execution. Running alongside that is a steady push toward being scriptable: distinct exit codes for missing source paths, snapshot removal failures and SIGINT, JSON output extended across more commands, and errors on invalid environment variables instead of silent defaults.
◆Prediction
The next release will most likely be another 0.19.x patch of platform-specific fixes, since every minor in this window has been followed by one within a month or two.

◆Recent moves

  1. 28d ago

    Mount safety, SFTP-on-Windows deletes, exclude correctness

    Nine user-facing fixes a month after 0.19.0, several of which change what restic actually backs up or deletes: excludes are now respected for duplicate directory entries, read-only files can be removed via SFTP on Windows servers, and mounting over the repository directory is blocked. Typical of a line where the patch releases carry real behavioral corrections rather than polish.

    View source ↗
  2. 1mo ago

    Distinct exit codes and Samba-served mounts

    The clearest expression of the scriptability thread: exit code 3 for missing backup source paths and failed snapshot removal, 130 on SIGINT, and hard errors when environment variables hold invalid values. Platform work continues with Samba-served mounts on Windows, correct ACL inheritance restore, and mode 0700 for SFTP-created repository directories.

    View source ↗
  3. 10mo ago

    Edge-case fixes for xattrs, chmod and stdin backups

    A narrow patch cleaning up filesystem edge cases — ignoring unsupported chmod and EOPNOTSUPP extended-attribute errors, a rare crash when a directory disappears mid-backup, and retry handling when the rest-server runs out of space. Maintenance within the established correctness pattern.

    View source ↗
  4. 1y ago

    Chunking attack mitigation and JSON output for check

    The most substantial release in the window: a mitigation for an attack on the content-defined chunking algorithm that underpins deduplication, plus JSON support in the check command and promotion of feature flags out of experimental status. The security work touches the core of how restic splits data, but the release is framed as hardening rather than redirection.

    View source ↗
  5. 1y ago

    macOS Sonoma mount and Windows VSS metadata fixes

    Platform-specific repairs — an unusable mount on macOS Sonoma under FUSE-T, metadata errors backing up removable Windows disks, and SFTP retry behavior on broken connections. The only addition is allowing prune --dry-run without taking a lock.

    View source ↗
  6. 1y ago

    Container-level SAS tokens for the Azure backend

    Azure repositories can now be initialized with container-level SAS/SAT tokens rather than only account-level ones, removing a real blocker for anyone scoped down to a single container. The rest is lock-handling and VSS metadata correctness, matching how backend capability usually arrives here: one credential path at a time.

    View source ↗