You can get started for FREE with a 10GB vault. I think that’s really cool, because it’s enough to actually give it a try and use it productively. It’s not time-limited, so you can set up a vault, stream some backups to it, and let it keep working to really test the service.

So I decided to do just that.

I have a small box I use for VPN purposes on DigitalOcean. It’s a 512MB “droplet” (ick – it’s a VPS people). I already back it up to my home lab, but it’s a good candidate for a Restic-based backup.

In general, when I backup, I capture the following:

• Essential file and filesystems, using a “default include” model. I exclude a bunch of directories such as /dev, but by default I include everything.
• I also include “status” dumps, such as dpkg -l, ps -ef, df -h, and other info.
• Finally I do database dumps.

In the case of my VPN server, the things I care about are:

• /etc, where all the OpenVPN config lives
• because I use @Nyr’s Road Warrior script and I put the .ovpn file in /root, I should back that up, too.
• My own backups put data in /backup (dpkg -l output, etc.) so I’ll back that up.