“Backed up” is a guess.
Backstop makes it a fact.
Every backup app tells you it ran. Almost none of them tell you the backup can still be read. Backstop checks — on a schedule, without being asked — and shows you what it found.
That sentence is the product. Backstop takes real files out of your backup, puts them back on your Mac, and compares them byte for byte with the originals.
The failure nobody notices
A backup can run every hour for a year and still be unreadable. A disk flips a bit. An upload truncates. A cloud provider silently drops an object. None of that appears in a backup log, because backing up never reads what is already there.
You find out on the day you need it. Which is, by definition, the worst day.
What Backstop actually does
Backs up, hourly
Encrypted, deduplicated, incremental. An external disk, a server, or any S3-compatible storage. It takes an APFS snapshot first, so a file being written mid-backup is captured whole.
Checks the repository, weekly
Confirms every file the backup refers to is actually present, and reports what it finds in words rather than a log file.
Reads the data back, monthly
Downloads a percentage of the stored data and verifies it against its hashes. The only check that can find a bit that flipped inside a pack.
Restores files, for real
Once a month it picks files at random, restores them to a temporary folder, and compares them with the originals still on your Mac. Then it tells you the result.
Four words, and it means them
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Healthy | Backed up recently, verified recently, and the last restore test passed. |
| Attention | Working, but something should be looked at eventually. Nothing is at stake today. |
| At risk | Still running, but a real risk exists — verification is overdue, space is nearly gone, no backup in over a day. |
| Failed | The backup is not doing its job. Data is missing, unreadable, or nothing has run in three days. |
Backstop will never show Healthy because a backup ran. It shows Healthy because a backup ran and the data was read back and real files were restored and matched. If it cannot prove something, it says so.
No lock-in, and we mean it literally
Your backup is a standard restic repository. Not a proprietary format with a documented escape hatch — the actual, unmodified thing, written by the actual restic binary, which Backstop bundles and drives.
If Backstop stops existing tomorrow, your data does not become a hostage. The commands to get it back are on the FAQ page, they are four lines long, and they work today.
Where it stands today
Backstop is built for people with 200 GB to 4 TB of work that cannot be recreated — photographers, lawyers, accountants, researchers, small studios. It runs on macOS 14 and later, on Apple silicon and Intel, and it does not need Terminal for anything.