Lion Cipher Lab
Make real encrypted, versioned backups with restic
- Cyber / Security Engineer
- Beginner
- ~40 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
A plain copy of your files protects you from a dead drive or a fat-fingered delete, but it does not protect the backup itself: a stolen laptop or a lost USB stick hands every file to whoever finds it, and a single overwritten copy cannot take you back to how a file looked last Tuesday, before ransomware or a bad edit touched it. restic fixes both. Every backup is a snapshot -- a complete, dated point-in-time version you can browse and restore from -- so you can roll back to before an infection or a mistake, not just to your one latest copy. And the entire repository is encrypted, so a drive…
What you'll learn
- encrypted, deduplicated backups with restic
- initializing and securing a backup repository
- creating and listing point-in-time snapshots
- restoring a single file from history
- retention and pruning old snapshots
- the 3-2-1 rule and test-your-restore discipline
Steps in this lab
- Why encrypted, versioned backups -- and what those words mean
- The five words you need, and the 3-2-1 rule
- Open a terminal and install restic
- Create the repository -- and understand that the passphrase IS the backup
- Back up a folder into a snapshot
- List your snapshots, then restore a single file
- Prune old snapshots, and verify -- retention plus the check nobody runs
- The habit that makes it real