Firstly, thanks for an amazing backup solution. I’m relatively new to home backups—I’ve only used Rclone for copying jobs until now.
Earlier this week, I started researching backup solutions. Some of the paid options are terrible, especially if you only need to back up a few key files. Many of them lack the flexibility for that specific use case.
At work, I’ve used a few solutions like Datto, Veeam, Rubrik, and N-able’s Cove.
Now, as an average sys admin, I find Restic amazing, but the learning curve is a bit steep for my needs. It takes a couple of hours to cover everything and test it thoroughly.
On the other hand, Kopia took only 15 minutes to set up. It also has a GUI for Windows and allows you to mount backups.
From a user’s point of view, Kopia seems similar to Restic. However, I’m curious why Restic has five times more stars on GitHub. Are there any major differences I’ve overlooked? Because Kopia just feels better.
That’s interesting because I have been using restic for years and always liked the simplicity. It took me a while to understand Kopia because it is doing some things differently and has much more features.
The reason why restic is more popular is probably because Alexander Neumann (the initial developer of restic) gave same talks at Fosdem and CCC and was therefor featured in news articles. I’m not aware of any bigger talks or news articles about Kopia.
I am using both. More often using CLI, way less GUI (Restic has no GUI, but there are archive browsers for it, like a Restic-Browser or NPBackup). They are similar in many ways from user perspective (which is a good thing) but for me, one big advantage of Restic over Kopia is “–files-from=” option. You can feed Restic with various lists of files and directories, creating simple external templates for various sources and destinations. Very useful option. Kopia on the other hand, doesnt need any external configuration files, all is in archive itself.
One more observation. After over two years of using Kopia, one of my local backup destination has 2 576 files and 20 508 folders (folder number is growing, empty folder do take a space in the NTFS file system). Restic archive (the same source data set and the similar time span) contains 3 297 files and 261 folders. This is probably a nitpick, but I am bit worried, how Kopia archive will look like in the, say, next 10 years.
Well, every empty folder take a bit of space (4KiB). 20 000 empty folders takes about 78 MiB, not much in the TiB scales of todays HD. One “pragmatic” issue with that I can think of is copy over network. It is slower then a Restic one (less directories to list). But anyway, this is just my “nitpick”.
I find restic definitely easier to implement than kopia. The latter maybe is easy to start with, thx to GUI but trying to do anything more complex needs CLI anyway and documentation lacks details often.
None is perfect and I would not trust neither 100% So I use both. Actually with restic I moved to rustic (restic repo compatible but much more feature reach).
Strong point of restic/rustic is rclone integration - works flawlessly. In kopia it is experimental and from my experience it is slow and not reliable.
What I like in kopia is out of the box objects locking support.
restic also wins by far in terms of community support - its authors always reply to forum posts and are happy to troubleshoot any issues. With kopia it is unfortunately not the case.
As already mentioned I use both but if would have to only choose one I would definitely go with rustic.
Restic and Kopia:
Restic is indeed popular and reliable. Many users trust it for their backup needs.
Kopia caught my attention due to its simple GUI and fast performance. For your small 1.7 GB use case, it seems like a good fit.
CLI vs. GUI:
Command-line interfaces (CLI) are powerful and flexible, especially for advanced users.
Having a basic GUI (graphical user interface) can make tools more accessible to a wider audience. It’s great that Kopia provides both options.
Windows Friendliness:
Restic might not be as Windows-friendly when it comes to mounting backups. It’s essential to find a solution that aligns with your platform and workflow.
Options and Community:
It’s wonderful that there are multiple options available. Choice allows users to find what suits them best.
The active community behind Restic is a positive sign for its ongoing development.
Rustic, I’d not heard of until now, I’ll have a read up
rclone as well kopia written in the same programming language and uses the same GoLang libraries to be able to use clouds, and kopia out of the box supports the same backends as rclone
That’s means you never steps on scenario - when you got a smart ransomware, that enumerates all files and start VERY slowly (a months) encrypting from oldest ones files to most recent. This way, if you having short retention policies, you will get you backup mostly encrypted by hacker. Also with 15 minutes setup, it most likely won’t save your backup from banal deletion by malicious program/user.
kopia, btw allows append only mode, but you really have to dive deeply in documentation to setup it up on separate computer in a server mode
kopia faster and has IMHO better design. restic added compression not so long ago, while kopia had it AFAIR from start
Same feeling, but I can’t say the same about documentation, as well inconsistency between web site documentation, embedded help and absents of documentation in git repository on github for some options. For many options, one just have to guess or dive deeply in a source code to figure out correct usage.
Sorry but this is not the case… kopia supports only handful of backends vs 40+ for rclone. restic uses bespoken integration - developed exactly for that. Kopia uses I think generic rclone serve webdav and this integration is clearly marked as experimental which based on my experience is very valid warning:)
It has zero meaning in case of kopia/rclone integration…
Because Kopia use a “3-char folder naming” strategy by default (“6-char” for KopiaUI) while Restic use a “2-char folder naming” strategy, Kopia create significantly more folders than Restic.
Changing “Sharding” strategy for Kopia can reduce folder count, which can boost up speed especially on a remote drive.
Welcome!
So I use both. Actually with restic I moved to rustic (restic repo compatible but much more feature reach).