Resticker

Chuck Norris does not use Resticker. His files are too afraid to get lost. For everyone else, Resticker is a macOS menu bar app that runs restic backups on a schedule. It backs up in the background, catches up after your Mac wakes from sleep, shows the last backup time, how much data moved, and your recent snapshots right in the menu, and restores files from any snapshot in a few clicks.

Why Resticker

• Catch-up runs — if your Mac was asleep through a scheduled backup, Resticker runs it once after waking, instead of replaying every slot it missed.
• Menu bar status — last backup time, data transferred, next scheduled run, and your recent snapshots, all visible without opening a terminal.
• Scheduled maintenance — restic forget --prune and restic check run automatically on their own interval after a successful backup, so retention and integrity checks don't need a separate cron job.
• Point-and-click restore — browse any snapshot's file tree, check the files and folders you want, and restore them to a folder you pick. Existing files in the target are never overwritten.
• Automatic retries — a failed backup retries a configurable number of times, with a delay between attempts, before falling back to the regular schedule.
• Keychain-backed secrets — your restic repository password and any cloud credentials are stored in the macOS keychain, not a config file.
• Any restic backend — local disks, SFTP, S3, or any other repository location restic supports, plus any extra restic arguments or environment variables your setup needs.
• macOS notifications — always on failure, optionally on success too.

Why not just a cron job?

A cron entry misses runs while your Mac sleeps, gives no status without digging through logs, and rarely gets a forget/check step added alongside it. Resticker closes those three gaps; it doesn't replace restic.

Getting Started

Prerequisites: macOS 14 or later, and restic itself:

brew install restic

1. Install via Homebrew

brew tap marcboeker/resticker https://github.com/marcboeker/resticker
brew trust --cask marcboeker/resticker/resticker
brew install --cask resticker
open /Applications/Resticker.app

Prefer to download a release directly or build the app yourself instead? See docs/INSTALL.md.

2. Configure

On first launch, Resticker has no repository, so it opens Settings… (⌘,) by itself. On the Repository page, enter your repository location and password — the password goes straight to the keychain. On the Backup page, add your source paths. Everything else has a sensible default and is explained next to its own setting in the window. Every change saves and applies right away, so there is nothing to reload or restart.

You can reopen Settings any time from the menu bar icon. By default, Resticker backs up every 4 hours and runs maintenance (forget + check) once a day.

Behavior

A few things worth knowing before you rely on this:

• Resticker refuses to start a backup while the repository, a source path, or the repository password is missing. The menu bar icon shows "Not configured" with the specific reason, and Settings marks the affected page and row.
• Once configured, the first launch has no recorded backup, so one starts right away.
• If your Mac was asleep through a scheduled backup, it runs once after waking, not once for every slot it missed.
• forget (the retention/pruning step) is not scoped by host or tag, so it applies to every snapshot in the repository. Only point Resticker at a repository that holds backups from this Mac alone.
• Cancel Backup stops restic cleanly and does not leave a stale lock or count as a failed run.
• Adding a source path that needs extra access, such as Mail, Messages, or Photos, triggers the macOS privacy dialog right away. If you deny it, Settings shows a warning with a button to open Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access.
• Restore… puts files back under their original full paths inside the target folder, for example <target>/Users/you/Documents/…. Backups and restores never run at the same time: a scheduled backup waits until the restore finishes. Canceling a restore keeps what was already written, partial files included, and quitting during a restore asks first.

Restoring your data

Choose Restore… in the menu, select a snapshot, and check the files and folders you want (a checked folder includes everything below it). Click Restore…, pick a target folder, and follow the progress in the window or the menu. When it finishes, a summary shows how many files were restored, skipped, or failed, with a button to show them in Finder.

For anything the window doesn't cover, use restic directly, see the restic restore documentation.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.