EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourcePersonal Backup & SyncHeadquarters: DE

Restic: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Restic is a command-line backup program that runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It is distributed as a single executable and needs no server. Restic removes duplicate data before writing it to storage, keeps only the changes in later snapshots, and lets you verify that backups can be restored. Supported storage includes a local directory, SFTP, a REST server, S3-compatible storage, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage and, through rclone, many other services.

Restic is free software under the BSD 2-Clause licence and is developed as a community project on GitHub; no commercial cloud service comes with it. It assumes that the storage location cannot be trusted and uses cryptography to protect confidentiality and integrity, so the storage provider does not see the data in readable form. Because you choose the storage backend yourself, that choice and its jurisdiction determine where the data resides. Your own server or a provider located in the EU keeps backups within Europe.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked July 2, 2026
HeadquartersDE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalAS48823 - Hosting.de GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
CategoryPersonal Backup & Sync
TypeProduct
Websiterestic.net ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Restic

The European alternatives to Restic come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

19 European Personal Backup & Sync vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Restic

Restic is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Restic scores best on data residency.

Restic is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Restic together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Restic?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Restic include Acronis True Image, Ashampoo Backup and Backup4all. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Restic?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Restic include BorgBackup, Cryptomator and FreeFileSync. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Restic GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Restic is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Restic an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Personal Backup & Sync

Personal Backup & Sync: Personal backup tools, file synchronisation and data recovery. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to Restic — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score