A guide for using restic, a command-line backup program, with local, SFTP, S3-compatible, cloud, and REST storage. It covers setup, scheduled operation, repository care, troubleshooting, and recovery.

Use it to create repositories, configure backup and retention policies, inspect snapshots, manage repository locks and health, and test restores in a separate location.

It helps ensure that backups are readable and restorable, rather than relying only on a successful backup command.

restic — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by magnus919

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add magnus919/agent-skills --skill restic

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/magnus919/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin restic — /plugin install restic after adding the marketplace above.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/restic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,528 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Excessive Agency · line 20
Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.

Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00094	$0.01528
Opus 5	$0.00047	$0.00764
Sonnet 5	$0.00019	$0.00306
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00153

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5deb48d1d27b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

restic scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/restic-preflight.sh, scripts/restic-verify.sh, scripts/test-restic-preflight.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

restic/SKILL.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Restic

Restic is a backup CLI, not a daemon. Treat a scheduled job or service manager as the execution layer. Every usable backup design proves four things: the source was captured, the repository is readable, retention is intentional, and a restore works in a separate target.

Operating contract

Discover before changing anything: restic version, backend type, repository format, source paths, credentials mechanism, schedule, retention policy, and recovery objective.
Keep repository passwords and backend credentials out of command history, logs, templates, and chat. Prefer a root/user-readable password file or a secret manager command over inline values.
Before any mutation, confirm target repository, source scope, exclusions, retention groups, schedule, maintenance window, and rollback/recovery path. Read-only discovery may proceed without confirmation.
Back up with stable host and tag conventions. Inspect the resulting snapshot, then test a restore into an empty, separate target. A successful backup exit code is not recovery evidence.
Treat forget, prune, key remove, rebuild-index, repair, migrate, and backend lifecycle rules as consequential operations. Preview where possible and keep a known-good recovery path.

First read-only discovery

scripts/restic-preflight.sh
restic version
restic snapshots --json
restic stats --mode raw-data

Set repository location and password source through the environment or command flags before commands that open a repository. Do not export a literal password into a shared shell history. See repository and backend setup.

When not to use

Do not load this for a one-time unencrypted file copy, a database backup format that restic cannot create, or provider-specific object-storage administration without a restic repository. Use the relevant application backup procedure for consistency, then use this skill to protect its resulting artifacts.

Choose the path

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 lines

Files

What ships with it

19 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

9d ago First seen · 101 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A 5deb48d1d27b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

restic is a skill published in the GitHub repository magnus919/agent-skills (76 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,528 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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