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Restore without Remaneo

Remaneo stores your backups as a standard restic repository in your own bucket. This page shows how to restore them with restic itself — free, open-source software — without the Remaneo app, a license, an account, or us. Keep it for the day you need it, and try it once while everything still works.

What you need

restic 0.14 or newer, the open-source backup program Remaneo is built on. It is free (BSD licence) and runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows, so the restore does not even need a Mac.

Your bucket details: the region it lives in and its name, both visible in the Scaleway console under Object Storage, plus an access key and secret key for it — the pair you created during setup, or a new one.

Your encryption password — the one you chose when setting up Remaneo. It is the key to the encryption, and it exists only with you: Remaneo kept it in your Mac’s Keychain, and nobody, including us, can recover it. Without it the data stays unreadable to anyone.

Nothing else. The repository format is openly documented — how files are split, encrypted, and indexed — so it can be read by any program that implements the specification, not only by restic.

Restore with restic

  1. Install restic. On a Mac with Homebrew, run the command below. On Linux use your distribution’s package; on any platform, the official builds are on restic’s release page. Then check the version is 0.14 or newer.

    brew install restic
restic version

  2. Work out your repository address. Remaneo writes the repository at the top of your bucket. Its address is s3:https:// followed by your region’s endpoint, a slash, and the bucket name:

    Bucket locationRepository address
    Pariss3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/your-bucket-name
    Amsterdams3:https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/your-bucket-name
    Warsaws3:https://s3.pl-waw.scw.cloud/your-bucket-name

  3. Tell restic where to look. Open a terminal and set four variables, replacing the placeholders with your keys, your region code (fr-par, nl-ams, or pl-waw), and your address from step 2. Leave the password out: restic asks for it when it needs it, so it never ends up in your shell history.

    On Windows PowerShell, write each line as $env:NAME="value" instead.

    export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your-access-key"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your-secret-key"
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="fr-par"
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="s3:https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/your-bucket-name"

  4. List your backups. Enter your encryption password when asked. restic lists every snapshot Remaneo made, with its date and the Mac it came from. If this works, everything else will: the keys, the address, and the password are all correct.

    restic snapshots

  5. Check the backups are intact (optional). The first command verifies the repository’s structure. The second also downloads a random 5% of the data and checks it byte for byte; your storage provider may bill that download as traffic.

    restic check
restic check --read-data-subset=5%

  6. Restore. To restore the latest snapshot in full into a folder called Restored in your home folder:

    restic restore latest --target ~/Restored

  7. Or restore just part of it. restic recreates the original full path inside the target, so your Documents folder arrives as ~/Restored/Users/your-name/Documents. To restore only that folder, name its original path. To find a single file first, search for it by name, or list everything in a snapshot:

    restic restore latest --target ~/Restored --include /Users/your-name/Documents
restic find "Tax return 2025.pdf"
restic ls latest

If something does not work

“repository does not exist” with an address you are sure of usually means the wrong region: Scaleway answers a bucket in another region exactly as if it did not exist. Try the other two endpoints from step 2.

“wrong password or no key found” means the password is not the one this repository was created with. There is no reset: the password is the encryption key, which is the point.

“repository is already locked”: if no copy of Remaneo is still running against this bucket, the lock is left over from an interrupted backup and restic unlock clears it safely.

Everything restic can do is now open to you, including carrying on with new backups into the same repository with restic backup. The restic documentation covers the rest.

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