Enh: Add support for Restic tool

[Andy Grover]

Restic (homepage https://restic.net/ docs https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) looks very similar in operation to duplicity. It claims easy, fast, verifiable, secure, etc. and provides the usual backup locations (local, sftp, S3 and other network blob storage services.)

In looking at the deja-dup code base, it appears that things are abstracted to enable alternative tools besides duplicity, but only duplicity is implemented. Adding support for Restic might be a nice test of that abstraction, and also let deja-dup be optionally be used without duplicity (and thus python2) installed.

[enboig (enboig)]

Also interested in this.

[Andy Grover (andy-groveronline)]

fwiw I hacked on this a little bit, and have a patch that copies deja's duplicity backend to a new "restic" and gets things building:

https://github.com/agrover/deja-dup/commits/work

The next step seemed to be changing the copied code to parse restic's output format instead of duplicity, but I ran into trouble because restic gets fancy with its output (uses ncurses or similar?). I think restic needs support added for some kind of machine-readable output -- json maybe? -- before work can proceed further.

[enboig (enboig)]

Checking the documentation it has a json output option

https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/manual_rest.html?highlight=json

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Heyo! Maintainer of Deja Dup here. We’ve never actually had another tool backend before. So this would be breaking new ground.

I would like to only support tool backends that are in active encouraged use. I am about to start a survey of other backup tools out there to see if I should indeed add another recommended tool backend besides duplicity.

I will look at Restic as part of this. Thanks for the recommendation.

I wanted to mention this just because I don’t want you to spend too much time before I know whether I’m likely to accept this feature.

[enboig (enboig)]

Another backup tool I am using is borg (https://www.borgbackup.org/); similar to restic, but with less options as destination.

What both have is a fuse mount option, and this would be a nice "bonus" to use in a GUI (IMHO).

Thanks for your time.

[Dark Dragon (darkdragon-001)]

Experimental support is added for Gnome 43: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/deja-dup/-/issues/181#note_1274881

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Ah yes, this can be closed - I forgot about this ticket, sorry! But yes, the 43.x line (which actually isn't aimed at GNOME 43, we just happen to have close version numbers right now) added experimental Restic support. You can enable it in the "Preferences -> Labs" tab.