SHSelfHostIndex

Backup & Recovery

Protect your data with self-hosted, encrypted backup and recovery tools.

82 self-hosted apps · 488 comparisons

All backup & recovery apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 431 words

A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup — and the second most common failure in this category is subtler: running a sync tool and calling it backup. Rclone is superb at what it does, moving files across 70+ cloud providers, but a sync mirrors your mistakes; delete or ransomware-encrypt a file and the next run faithfully propagates the damage. The tools below keep encrypted, deduplicated, point-in-time snapshots instead, which is what lets you reach back to last Tuesday.

How to choose a backup tool

The first axis is interface. Restic (35,724 stars) and BorgBackup (13,651) are command-line programs, scriptable and battle-tested, and Restic ships no scheduler at all — you bring cron or systemd timers. If you will not maintain a script, be honest about it and pick a GUI: Duplicati has offered scheduled, web-managed backups since 2008 (with a famously long beta history and slow restores as the trade-off), and Kopia gives you both a CLI and a clean desktop app. The second axis is destination. Borg is happiest pushing to another machine over SSH, where its append-only repository mode means a compromised client cannot destroy its own history — a genuinely useful ransomware property. Restic and Kopia instead speak to a long list of cloud and object-storage backends directly. Third, weight barely matters here: everything above runs in 256 MB, so choose on workflow, not hardware.

Where to start

For most self-hosters in 2026 the answer is Restic with Backrest on top. Backrest (7,208 stars, first released 2024) wraps Restic in a web UI with scheduling, retention policies, health monitoring, and notifications — Restic's engine without Restic's homework. Its own listing notes the honest caveats: it is a young project and depends entirely on Restic underneath, which is also its strength. If your backup target is a second box you control over SSH, BorgBackup remains the standard, and the BorgBackup vs Restic comparison walks the differences. If you want a single tool with a first-party GUI and no orchestration layer, Kopia is the modern pick.

Whichever you choose, the ritual matters more than the tool: two destinations, one off-site, and a test restore into an empty directory this month, not someday. Default pick for a first-timer: Backrest driving Restic to one local disk and one cloud bucket. It is a 30-minute setup, and it turns the category's hardest habit — actually checking your backups — into glancing at a dashboard.

Curated picks

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Backup & Recovery comparisons

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