Backstop for Mac

Backstop makes encrypted, deduplicated, incremental backups of a Mac to an external disk, a folder, an SFTP server, or any S3-compatible storage — Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, MinIO. It is built on restic, and what it writes is a standard restic repository.

The difference is verification. A backup can run every hour for a year and still be unreadable: a disk flips a bit, an upload truncates, a provider silently drops an object. None of that appears in a backup log, because backing up never reads what is already there. You find out on the day you need it.

What it checks, on a schedule, without being asked

• Weekly: an integrity check that every file the backup refers to is present.
• Monthly: a read-back of a configurable percentage of the stored data, verified against its hashes — the only check that finds a bit that flipped inside a pack.
• Monthly: a restore drill. Files are picked at random from the most recent backup, restored to a temporary folder, and compared byte for byte with the originals still on the Mac. The result is recorded with a date.

Features

• A health status that never reads Healthy because a backup ran — only because a backup ran, the data was read back, and real files were restored and matched.
• A Proof view with a dated, plain-English verification history, exportable as a PDF.
• An APFS snapshot before each run, so a file being written mid-backup is captured whole.
• Skips backups below 20% battery unless plugged in, waits for wi-fi rather than a tethered phone, and respects a do-not-run window.
• Detects stale locks, so one crashed run does not block every backup after it.
• Repository passwords are stored in the macOS Keychain. No account, no phone-home, and no telemetry unless crash reporting is switched on.
• Does not require macFUSE.
• The backup is a standard restic repository, readable by any restic on any machine. The commands to recover files without Backstop installed are printed on the product's FAQ and executed by its own test suite against a real repository on every release.