You do not need Backstop
restic is free, excellent, and does the hard part. Backstop is the same engine with the operations work already done. Here is the honest version of what that means.
What you would set up yourself
To match what Backstop does out of the box, running restic by hand, you would write and maintain roughly this:
- A LaunchAgent that runs hourly, and does not run when the disk is missing.
- A password stored somewhere better than a plaintext file in your home folder.
- An APFS snapshot taken, mounted, backed up from, unmounted and thinned — every run, without leaking snapshots when a run fails.
- Exclusions for caches, VM images and — importantly — cloud placeholder files, so a backup does not pull your whole Dropbox down over the wire.
- A weekly
restic check, a monthly--read-data-subset, and somewhere for the results to go that you will actually look at. - A monthly restore test: pick files, restore them, hash them, compare with the originals, report.
- Something that notices when none of the above has run for three days, and tells you.
- Retry with backoff on transient network errors, and no retry on a wrong password.
- Stale-lock detection, so one crashed run does not block every backup afterwards.
All of it is doable. Most of it is a weekend. The last three are where home-grown scripts quietly stop working, because nothing complains when they do.
Side by side
| restic, by hand | Backstop | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | $39 once, 3 Macs |
| Repository format | restic | restic — the same one |
| Encryption | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduling | You write a LaunchAgent | Built in |
| Password storage | You decide | macOS Keychain |
| APFS snapshot for consistency | You script it | Automatic |
| Battery and metered-network awareness | No | Yes |
| Scheduled integrity check | You script it | Weekly |
| Scheduled data read-back | You script it | Monthly, configurable |
| Automated restore drill | You script it — almost nobody does | Monthly, with a report |
| Tells you when it has silently stopped | No | After 72 hours |
| Browsing snapshots | restic ls, or mount with macFUSE | A file browser, no macFUSE |
| Printable proof for an insurer or auditor | No | PDF report |
| Works without the vendor | Yes | Yes — same commands |
When you should not buy this
If you already run restic on a schedule and you already run restore drills, Backstop has little to offer you. Buy it for a family member instead, or do not buy it at all.
If you are comfortable in a terminal and enjoy this sort of thing, the setup is genuinely a weekend and the result is genuinely yours. We would rather say that than sell you something you do not need.
What you are actually paying for
Not the backup. The backup is restic, and restic is free. You are paying for the part that keeps proving the backup still works after you have stopped thinking about it — and for the fact that somebody else has already thought about stale locks, cloud placeholder files, clocks that move backwards, and the seventeen other things that make a home-grown script fail silently in month eight.