Best for: The default choice for most people — scriptable, portable, storage-agnostic.
A single static binary with no daemon and no database, supporting local disks, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, restic's own REST server and dozens more through the same interface. That portability is why it has become the default recommendation: your backup strategy stops being a commitment to a vendor. Deduplication is fast and the repository format is stable and well documented.
Backup & Recovery
BSD-2-Clause
Intermediate
★ 36,371
Replaces: Backblaze, Duplicati, Arq Backup
Full review of Restic →
Best for: Backing up many machines to storage you own, with maximum deduplication.
Older than restic and more mature, with deduplication that is exceptionally efficient on large repositories and a repository model built around machines you control. It needs Borg installed at the target rather than being a pure client-server tool, which is the main thing that rules it out for cloud-only targets.
Backup & Recovery
BSD-3-Clause
Advanced
★ 13,796
Replaces: Backblaze, Carbonite, Acronis
Full review of BorgBackup →
Best for: People who want GUI-driven policy and scheduling rather than cron scripts.
Same core design as the other two with a policy engine on top: per-directory retention, scheduling, bandwidth limits, and a real dashboard. If you prefer to configure backups once in a UI rather than maintain a shell script, this is the most comfortable of the three — at the cost of being a slightly younger project.
Backup & Recovery
Apache-2.0
Intermediate
★ 14,233
Replaces: Backblaze, Arq Backup, Duplicati
Full review of Kopia →
Best for: Restic users who want a GUI instead of a cron script.
A web interface over restic, which is precisely what it looks like: you get restic's repository format and portability, with scheduling, retention and restore browsing in a browser. It solves the most common objection to restic — that everything happens on a command line — without inventing a new backup format.
Backup & Recovery
GPL-3.0
Beginner
★ 7,440
Replaces: Duplicati, Arq Backup, Backblaze
Full review of Backrest →
Best for: Proxmox VE users backing up whole VMs and containers.
If your infrastructure is Proxmox, this is not really optional: it does incremental, deduplicated, verified backup at the virtual-machine level, and restores are far faster than restoring from inside the guest. Verification is built in, which directly addresses the "did it actually work" problem.
Backup & Recovery
AGPL-3.0
Advanced
★ 255
Replaces: Veeam, Acronis, Nakivo
Full review of Proxmox Backup Server →
Best for: Getting a first real backup running with minimum friction.
The gentlest on-ramp in the category: a web UI, scheduled encrypted deduplicated backups to nearly any destination, and a low barrier to getting a first backup configured today. Its database can be fragile under heavy interruption, so it is not the choice for the most demanding setups — but a backup you actually configured beats a better one you never got around to.
Files & Sync
LGPL-2.1
Beginner
★ 15,046
Replaces: Backblaze, Carbonite, Acronis
Full review of Duplicati →
Best for: Restoring a whole machine, not just its files.
Client-server with a focus on whole-machine imaging: install an agent, and it handles file-level and image-level backup, including bare-metal restore. That covers the case the others handle awkwardly — the machine itself is dead and you need it back, not just its files.
Backup & Recovery
AGPL-3.0
Intermediate
★ 932
Replaces: Acronis, Veeam, Backblaze
Full review of UrBackup →
Best for: Kubernetes clusters that need resource and volume backup together.
Velero, the Kubernetes answer: back up cluster resources and persistent volumes together, so a namespace can be restored coherently rather than as orphaned storage and missing manifests. Restore testing into a scratch namespace is a first-class workflow, which is exactly the discipline the rest of this list keeps insisting on.
Backup & Recovery
Apache-2.0
Advanced
★ 10,320
Replaces: Veeam Kasten, CloudCasa, Trilio
Full review of Velero →