Concerns for using Rustic in a production environment?

[nickchomey]

So far I'm thrilled with Rustic - notably, it uses rclone, does a proper remote/local sync (so that I no longer need to mount an rclone remote and use rclone sync), and the default compression mode reduces my backup size by 3x and backup time by 2x.

I'd love to start using it in my own production environment. More importantly, I've been helping with the CyberPanel Litespeed Webserver Control Panel project, and one thing that I tried to do is integrate rclone with it to allow us to backup to a variety of remote locations. But it is currently using restic for incremental backups, which doesn't do a proper sync. Given that Rustic does this, I'd like to implement this there. (Here is the issue there that tracks this effort) However, you have expressed concerns with using Rustic in a production environment as it is still very much a beta tool.

So, could you please make a checklist of concerns that you have for using Rustic in a production environment so that I/others can both assess its risk and track your progress?

Thanks!

[aawsome]

Thanks a lot for this question! I'd also like to keep this issue as a tracking issue and close it when I think we are ready for production.

So far, there are two major concerns, I am having:

• rustic misses automatic tests. IMO these are really needed to prevent a small change being able to corrupt or remove backup data and getting productive acidentially.
• There are some points where errors are not handled but rustic will just abort, i.e. some unwrap() in the code. These should be handled better to be robust also in edge cases.

Besides this, as rustic is designed to be 100% compatible with restic, users can always run restic to check the repo or restore from it. So compatibility issues are also show-stoppers for going productive. Currently these are open:

• #34
• #57 (IMO this is a minor issue and can be postponed)

BTW: Actually, I am already using rustic for my productive backups.

[nickchomey]

Thanks. I'll probably set something up with Rustic for my own personal backups. But it would be better to wait until you address those issues before incorporating it into a production tool like CyberPanel.

Perhaps you could also add a section to your above comment for "major features" that are outstanding? As well as checkboxes * [ ]

Or, perhaps even better - close this issue and create your own new issue that doesn't have my commentary?

[aawsome]

The two restic-compatibility-issues are IMO fixed by #116 which has just been merged.