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Autorestic vs Restic Cron

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted backup & recovery options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
AU Autorestic Config-driven wrapper for Restic backups VS RE Restic Cron Containerized scheduled restic backup runner
FeatureAutoresticRestic Cron
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score52 · Fair70 · Good
CategoryBackup & RecoveryBackup & Recovery
LicenseApache-2.0BSD-2-Clause
LanguageGoShell
Setup difficultyEasyEasy
Min. RAM64 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, binarydocker
GitHub stars★ 1,868★ 715
First released20192019
ReplacesBackblaze, CrashPlanBackblaze

What are Autorestic and Restic Cron?

Autorestic

Autorestic is a higher-level wrapper around Restic that makes it easy to manage multiple backups from a single declarative configuration file. It handles backends, locations, and scheduling.

  • Declarative backup config
  • Multiple backends and locations
  • Cron-based scheduling

Restic Cron

A containerized scheduler that runs restic backups on a cron schedule and prunes old snapshots. It is designed to be a drop-in backup sidecar for self-hosted stacks.

  • Cron-scheduled backups
  • Automatic pruning
  • restic backend
  • Sidecar container

Autorestic vs Restic Cron: key differences

Autorestic is written in Go, while Restic Cron is built with Shell. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Autorestic versus BSD-2-Clause for Restic Cron. Autorestic has the considerably larger community, at 1,868 GitHub stars versus 715.

Why pick each one

Choose Autorestic if…

  • Released under the Apache-2.0 license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (1.9k GitHub stars)
Autorestic details

Choose Restic Cron if…

  • Released under the BSD-2-Clause license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Written in Shell
Restic Cron details

Frequently asked questions

Is Autorestic or Restic Cron better?

Neither is universally better. Autorestic has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Autorestic and Restic Cron free and open-source?

Yes. Autorestic is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Restic Cron under BSD-2-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Autorestic and Restic Cron with Docker?

Autorestic: yes. Restic Cron: yes.

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