Data integrity is the basis of professional infrastructure management; yet backup strategies often fail because of the complexity or high storage costs. In this guide, we will implement a secure and automated Restic backup to Storage VPS, which ensures your data is encrypted, deduplicated, and safely stored off-site.

By combining Restic’s modern snapshot capabilities with a reliable destination like Perlod hosting, you can create a strong disaster recovery pipeline that guarantees your data is protected against hardware failures, accidental deletions, and security threats.

Prerequisites for Restic Backup to Storage VPS

Before you start the Restic backup to storage VPS, ensure you have the following resources and proper access to establish a secure connection between your servers:

• Source Server: The machine you want to back up, for example, your production server.
• Destination Server: A Storage VPS with SSH access.
• SSH Key Access: Ensure the source server can SSH into the destination server without a password.

Quick check: You can run the command below from your source server:

ssh user@storage-vps-ip

If it asks for a password, you must set up SSH keys with ssh-copy-id before you start.

Once you are done with these prerequisites, follow the steps below to complete the restic backup to storage VPS.

Install Restic on Source Server

You must install the Restic package on the machine you want to back up. Restic is available in the default repositories of most major Linux distributions.

On Ubuntu and Debian-based distros, you can use:

apt update
apt install restic -y

On CentOS and RHEL-based distros, you can use:

dnf update -y
dnf install epel-release -y
dnf install restic -y

Then, you can run the restic self-update command, which is recommended for the latest features:

restic self-update

Initialize Encrypted Repository on Storage VPS

In this step, you must initialize the storage location on your storage VPS. This process creates the necessary directory structure for your data and establishes the master encryption keys that will protect your backups from unauthorized access.

First, you must define your repository location string:

sftp:user@remote_IP:/path/to/backup_folder

Then, you can run the initialization command on your storage VPS:

restic -r sftp:[email protected]:/var/backups/restic-repo init

Remember to replace [email protected] with your Storage VPS username and password.

Important Note: You will be asked to type a password. Save this password securely; if you lose it, your backups are unrecoverable.

If you need a safe place to store your critical credentials, you can check this guide on Secrets Management with HashiCorp Vault for a proper solution.

Create Backup Automation Script on Source Server

At this point, you can create a shell script on your source server to automate the entire backup workflow. This script will handle authentication, perform the backup, and automatically remove old snapshots based on your retention policy to keep your storage usage efficient.

Create the automation script file with the command below:

nano /usr/local/bin/restic-backup.sh

Paste the following script into the file and edit the VARIABLES section with your details:

#!/bin/bash

# --- VARIABLES ---
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="sftp:[email protected]:/var/backups/restic-repo"
export RESTIC_PASSWORD="your-strong-password-here"

# List of directories to backup
BACKUP_PATHS="/etc /var/www /home"

# Retention Policy (Pruning)
# Keep: Last 7 days, 4 weeks, and 6 months
RETENTION="--keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --keep-monthly 6"

# --- COMMANDS ---

# 1. Perform Backup
echo "Starting Backup..."
restic backup $BACKUP_PATHS --verbose

# 2. Prune Old Backups (Forget + Prune)
echo "Pruning Old Snapshots..."
restic forget $RETENTION --prune

# 3. Check Integrity (Optional but recommended periodically)
# echo "Checking Repository Integrity..."
# restic check

Once you are done, save and close the file.

Make the script executable and restrict permissions since it contains your password:

chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/restic-backup.sh

You can test the backup automation script manually with the command below:

/usr/local/bin/restic-backup.sh

You should see Restic scanning files, uploading blobs, and then cleaning up old snapshots.

Schedule Backups with Systemd

Now that you have a working backup script on the source server, you need to schedule it to run automatically. You can use Systemd timers for this task, as they provide superior reliability, logging, and error handling compared to traditional Cron jobs, which ensure your critical data is backed up consistently.

Create the service unit file for your Restic backup with the command below:

nano /etc/systemd/system/restic-backup.service

Add the following content to the file:

[Unit]
Description=Restic Backup Service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/restic-backup.sh
User=root

Then, create the Timer unit file, which schedules the service:

nano /etc/systemd/system/restic-backup.timer

Add the following content to the file that runs daily at 3 AM:

[Unit]
Description=Run Restic Backup Daily

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:00:00
Persistent=true

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

Once you are done, enable and start the service with the commands below:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now restic-backup.timer

To verify the schedule, you can run:

systemctl list-timers restic-backup.timer

Snapshot Management and Disaster Recovery

A backup strategy is incomplete without a tested recovery plan. In this final step, you can use these essential commands on your source server to list your available snapshots, verify the integrity of your repository, and restore your data quickly in the event of data loss.

To list all snapshots, you can use:

export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="sftp:[email protected]:/var/backups/restic-repo"
export RESTIC_PASSWORD="your-strong-password-here"

restic snapshots

Restore the latest backup with the command below:

restic restore latest --target /tmp/restore-test

To restore a specific snapshot ID, you can use:

restic restore a1b2c3d4 --target /tmp/restore-test

To mount the repository and mount backups like a file system, you can use:

mkdir /mnt/restic
restic mount /mnt/restic

Now you can browse /mnt/restic/snapshots in your file manager.

You can also automate this verification process with the Bash Automated Backup Integrity Script tutorial to get alerted instantly if a backup is corrupted.

That’s it, you are done with the restic backup to storage VPS.

FAQs

Conclusion

At this point, you have a fully automated and secure backup system. Your data is encrypted and safely sent to your Storage VPS. With Systemd handling the scheduling and Restic managing deduplication and automation, your backup strategy is now efficient enough to run daily without impacting performance.

Just remember to test a restore to ensure your disaster recovery plan is always ready for action.

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