Use the pre-installed Restic for backups

TrueNAS General
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I just noticed that TrueNAS community edition is already including Restic for their TrueNAS backup tasks.

I would like to use Restic to backup my data to iDrive and OneDrive.

Is there any problem if I use the already installed restic to backup my data? Any custom Restic setting will be overwritten if I’ll update TrueNAS?

Is there anything I should consider before doing it?

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I use restic on TrueNAS. There is technically nothing stopping you from doing this, but you’d need to script/command this yourself. You could add a cronjob. restic is in the default PATH.

You may also wish make sure the version of restic will be suitable for your needs, as the shipped version may be older than the latest release of restic.

You should make sure you test TrueNAS upgrades before relying on future versions and restic, in the event of changes that aren’t announced.

restic settings are passed on the command line at run time, so there are no settings to be lost.

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Thanks. From your message it doesn’t sound like the “proper” way to do it, even if it is doable.

Is there anything better that you suggest to do?

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It’s not supported, but I’m doing pretty much exactly that. A few reasons:

  1. I’m not interfering with or trying to outsmart the middleware. I’m just using a binary on the box that also doesn’t interact with the middleware. The restic binary doesn’t block when a single copy is running, so even running concurrently with a Storj Cloud Backup task should not (at least inherently) cause issues.

  2. The binary can be replaced with your own (note the boot pool is read only) if the shipping binary ever disappeared.

  3. Strictly speaking, with a cronjob you can run it as a non-root user. This might be good. It might lead to permissions issues that you’d need to sort out.

It’s also worth noting that iX recently announced that they would stop being direct about the software and technologies used in favor of talking about capabilities and features. However, if before upgrading you want to check what version of restic is in use, you can check the SBOMs.

If using restic like this required doing something custom or screwy with the middleware, replacing the binary that the middleware uses, or some other esoteric path, then I would look elsewhere. As it is, this is fairly low risk IMHO, but only you can judge that because only you can be responsible for your NAS.

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