wtf is relicta?

relicta is a backup tool for macOS laptops built around restic, an existing open source backup program. Rather than backing up an entire hard drive, it backs up a specific list of folders and files you choose, things you cannot easily get back if they are lost: dotfiles, tool settings.env files, documents, and code repositories with changes that have not been committed anywhere else. The whole tool is a single bash script, so anyone using it can read through the code before trusting it with sensitive data. Setup starts with cloning the repository and running an install script. That script walks you through picking a storage backend (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, or MinIO), storing your credentials in the macOS Keychain, generating a repository password you are required to save somewhere safe, choosing which files to include or exclude, running a first backup, and scheduling future backups to run automatically in the background using macOS's launchd system. Once set up, backups run on their own on a schedule, catching up automatically if the laptop was asleep and skipping runs if it was shut off, so you end up with roughly one backup per day without having to think about it. Old backups are kept on a rotating schedule, a handful of daily copies, several weekly copies, and a run of monthly copies, and older ones are cleaned up automatically. restic encrypts everything on your machine before it gets uploaded, so whichever storage provider you use only ever sees scrambled data. There is also a command for checking backup health, one for testing that a restored file actually matches what is on disk, and a way to run any restic command directly. Teams can use one shared storage bucket with a separate encrypted backup per person, so removing someone's access is a single key revocation. The one manual step macOS requires is granting Full Disk Access to restic, since macOS blocks background processes from reading folders like Desktop and Documents by default. The tool is released under the MIT license.