Read your inventory with restic alone

Every nightly snapshot holds a readable copy of each location: an index.html you open in a browser, a spreadsheet (CSV) of the things, thumbnails, and the receipts and documents the pages link to. It is written for the day Kept can’t run: the server burned, the disk died, or Kept is long gone. All you need is:

• restic, the backup program, on any computer (Windows, macOS or Linux). Its documentation lists a package or a download for each. Use version 0.19.1, the one Kept uses, or newer.
• The repository and its password, from the recovery kit, and for an S3 bucket or an SFTP server, the credentials the kit lists with them.
• The backup itself: the disk, the bucket or the SFTP server it was sent to.

1. Point restic at the backup

The recovery kit’s backup section gives the repository’s location and password, and, for S3, the two keys. In a terminal:

export RESTIC_REPOSITORY='<the repository line from the kit>'
export RESTIC_PASSWORD='<the backup password from the kit>'
# S3 only:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='<from the kit>'
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='<from the kit>'

On Windows PowerShell, $env:RESTIC_REPOSITORY = '…' and so on. A directory backup copied onto a laptop is just its path: the restic folder inside the backup directory.

2. Pick a snapshot

restic snapshots

lists every snapshot with its time and tags. Take the newest one tagged nightly (or manual); a pre_upgrade snapshot holds only the database, not the readable copy. Note its ID.

3. Restore the readable copy

restic restore <snapshot ID> --target ./kept-readable --include /backup/readable

This restores only the readable copy, not the database dump or the full-size files, into a new folder kept-readable.

4. Open it

Open kept-readable/backup/readable/index.html in a browser. It lists every location, with its owner and when the copy was made; each location’s own index.html lists its places and things, with their photos, purchase details and documents. README.txt beside it says the same.

The pages need no network and load nothing from anywhere else. Each location’s CSV opens in a spreadsheet.

Each location’s copy is what its owner could see in Kept: money appears as the owner saw it, and secret values (the Wi-Fi password you stored on the router) are never in it. A location whose copy failed that night is listed as “not included tonight”; take the snapshot before it.

Browse without restoring

On Linux, and on macOS with macFUSE, restic mount ./mnt shows every snapshot as folders you can open in place. It needs FUSE, which Windows doesn’t have; restore works everywhere.