Sane Local Backups with restic

After years of ad-hoc rsync scripts, I finally settled on restic for local snapshots. Initialize a repository once:

restic init --repo /mnt/backup/restic

Then back up your home directory, excluding the usual noise:

restic -r /mnt/backup/restic backup ~ \
  --exclude ~/.cache \
  --exclude ~/Downloads

Check what snapshots exist and prune old ones:

restic -r /mnt/backup/restic snapshots
restic -r /mnt/backup/restic forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4

The part that convinced me: restores are first-class, not an afterthought.