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, and shows the last backup time, how much data moved, and your recent snapshots right in the menu.
- 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 --pruneandrestic checkrun automatically on their own interval after a successful backup, so retention and integrity checks don't need a separate cron job. - 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.
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.
Prerequisites: macOS 14 or later, and restic itself:
brew install resticbrew tap marcboeker/resticker https://github.com/marcboeker/resticker
brew trust --cask marcboeker/resticker/resticker
brew install --cask resticker
open /Applications/Resticker.appPrefer to download a release directly or build the app yourself instead? See docs/INSTALL.md.
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.
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.
Resticker has no restore UI (yet). Restoring is a plain restic command against your repository, see the restic restore documentation.
MIT, see LICENSE.