Backups with Restic

2026-06-25

I haven external drive with an ext4 partition on /dev/sdb1

Initialising the backup media

First, label the partition

sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 my_restic_backup

Add it to fstab:

LABEL=my_restic_backup  /mnt/backup  ext4  rw,noauto  0  0

Create the restic repo

I’m using Pass, so generate the backup key

mount /mnt/backup
pass generate my-restic-backup 64
pass -c my-restic-backup
restic init --repo /mnt/backup/restic-repo

Configuring Restic

I find it easier to create an excludes.txt, basically the restic equivalent of .gitignore

Exclude any except things I want to backup, eg /root/excludes.txt:

/*
!/etc/apt/sources.list
!/etc/default/keyboard
!/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
!/etc/locale.conf
!/etc/network/interfaces
!/etc/systemd/system/user-suspend@.service
!/etc/udev/rules.d/95-hdmi-plug.rules
!/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
!/root
!/opt
!/home

Backing up

restic -r /mnt/backup/my-restic-repo backup --verbose --one-file-system --exclude-file=/root/excludes.txt /

This is will appear as a new snapshot:

restic -r /srv/restic-repo snapshots