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Snapback

Snapback is about one thing: getting a file back. Restoring a file should be as easy as it was in 2008 — pick the moment, pick the file, restore it. Snapback is a restore tool for your backups. It supports Restic today, which stores the snapshots.

Install

curl -fsSL https://snapback.run/install.sh | sh

The installer downloads the latest release (v1.4.0) for your operating system and architecture, verifies it against the signed checksums.txt, and installs the binary to /usr/local/bin, or to ~/.local/bin when that directory is not writable or not on your PATH.

Before running it you need FUSE (fuse3 on Linux, macFUSE on macOS), the restic CLI and an existing Restic repository. You can also build from source with go build ./cmd/snapback. The usage guide covers setup, the service and every command.

How it works

Each directory your backups cover gets a read-only .snapshot entry. It lists the Restic snapshots that contain the directory, newest first, plus a latest alias. Restore with any program that reads files, for example cp .snapshot/latest/report.docx .. Snapback never writes to the Restic repository.

While the daemon runs, a new snapshot can take up to about a minute to appear under .snapshot, because the view reloads Restic snapshot metadata on a refresh interval.

Status

Snapback v0.1 is early, pre-release software. Expect breaking changes. Linux is the v0.1 target.

The .snapshot view, latest, snap, seed, link, the daemon, the web UI, doctor and the systemd user service passed the v0.1 acceptance run on Linux (CI, fuse3) — Acc 1 to 17 — with macOS (macFUSE) as supplementary evidence. Acc 2, 12 and 17 are Linux-only and were skipped in the macOS runs. Item-by-item results are in the v0.1 acceptance report.

Roadmap

These backends are planned, not supported yet:

  • Borg: planned.
  • Kopia: planned.
  • ZFS snapshots: planned.
  • Btrfs snapshots: planned.

Versions

This site is built from the master branch by the docs workflow (.github/workflows/docs.yml) and describes the current release, v1.4.0; per-release documentation is not published. Released versions are listed on the GitHub releases page.

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