Set up Restic for backups using Google Drive

Although official documentation instructed to use curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash for installing rclone, since rclone is available view brew, I figured that I'll use brew instead, for the sake of mroe centralized storage.

brew install rclone restic
rclone config

We need to configure Google Drive to work with rclone. This can be done by following the official instructions found here:

1. Log into the Google API Console with your Google account. It doesn’t matter what Google account you use. (It need not be the same account as the Google Drive you want to access)

2. Select a project or create a new project.

3. Under “ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES” [...] enable the “Google Drive API”.

4. Click “Credentials” in the left-side panel (not “Create credentials”, which opens the wizard), then “Create credentials”, then “OAuth client ID”. It will prompt you to set the OAuth consent screen product name, if you haven’t set one already.

You must configure your OAuth consent screen in order to see the OAuth option in Step 4. This is very important.

1. Choose an application type of “other”, and click “Create”. (the default name is fine)

2. It will show you a client ID and client secret. [...]

Now connect rclone to this API, following this doc. The following optional settings are worth noticing:

• Since we are going to encrypt our backups anyways, it makes little sense to use the "Computers" folders on Google Drive.

• Leave Service Account Credentials blank. This will have the effect that rclone require you to authorize the Google account whose Drive you want to save backups to. This can be a separate account than the one you configured the Google Cloud project with. Don't user Auto Config -- it didn't work for me on my MacBook at least.

• Don't set a password for the rclone config file.

Now you can quit rcloud config. Issue the following command to let restic talk to rcloud:

restic -r rclone:[rcloud config name]:restic-backups/macbook/ init

Use a strong password.

Initiate your first backup with:

restic -r rclone:[rcloud config name]:restic-backups/macbook/ backup ~/Backups

After a backup, you should be able to mount the storage to a local directory:

brew cask install osxfuse # if you haven't done this already
restic -r rclone:[rcloud config name]:restic-backups/macbook/ mount ~/mnt