Backrest
| License | FOSS problems | Maintenance | SSO | Users | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MITPermissive license. Preserve the copyright notice. Applies only to the covered code — your surrounding project can stay under any license. | — | Active | ❌ | Unlimited | ❌ |
Evaluation
What it is
Backrest is a self-hosted web UI over restic, the client-side-encrypted backup tool. It handles scheduling (cron expressions), retention policies (automatic pruning), and S3-compatible remote storage natively, and runs as its own Coolify-deployed service like everything else here.
Why it could be useful
Every restic repository is encrypted client-side (AES-256) before anything leaves the machine — not optional, not something to configure — so sensitive data caught up in a volume backup (SSH keys, certs) is protected in transit and at rest automatically. Bundling restic's scheduling and retention into a web UI means one deployed service covers the entire off-site half of infrastructure recovery, rather than stitching together cron, a bare CLI, and a separate secrets story by hand.
Why not to go for it
It only backs up what's actually on disk — the same blind-copy limitation as any volume-level tool (see Framework → Backups principle 5), so it doesn't understand any single app's data model any better than a raw file copy would. And it's one more service to run and keep patched, for a job that's fundamentally a static configuration plus a schedule rather than something needing a rich UI day to day.
Setup
- Deploy Backrest as a Coolify service, pointed at the same off-site Infomaniak Object Storage bucket the Terraform state backend uses.
- Save the restic repository password to Proton Pass immediately.
- Configure its backup targets:
/mnt/data/docker/volumes//mnt/data/coolify-data/
Not yet deployed — this section fills in with anything else that comes up once it actually runs.