Frequently asked questions
In short: what Sard does today and what it does not do yet.
What is Sard?
A backup console for the mixed infrastructure of small and mid-sized businesses. Sard does sources, schedules, reports and restore verification; restic does storage, deduplication and encryption.
Is Sard production-ready?
No. It is in early development, a pre-release. Restoring over existing data from the console is not there yet: the console restores into a new place.
How does Sard check that a backup restores?
A verifier on a separate machine restores the snapshot in an isolated sandbox and compares the copy with the source’s fingerprint. PostgreSQL and files are verified this way today.
Does backup data pass through the server?
No. The agent streams data to storage through restic directly.
Do I need to open ports on the hosts?
No. The agent dials out to the server over gRPC with mTLS, so hosts have no inbound ports. The server needs port 9090 open for agents.
Where are keys and passwords kept?
On the agent host. The server holds no storage keys and knows repositories and secrets by name only.
What can I back up today?
Files and directories of Linux hosts, and PostgreSQL databases. Candidates for later: 1C on PostgreSQL, MikroTik and Eltex configurations, MySQL. A plan, not a promise.
Does Sard work on Windows or with network equipment?
Not yet. The agent installs on Linux amd64 and arm64 with systemd. MikroTik and Eltex configurations are planned, not promised.
Can I install it without internet access?
Yes. Every release carries an image archive, install files, SBOMs and signatures that are verified offline.
What if the Sard server itself is lost?
The server backs itself up every night. With the recovery card, access to the storage and the repository password it can be brought up on a new machine, and agents reconnect without re-enrolling.
Where do backups go?
Into restic repositories: S3-compatible storage, SFTP or a local disk.
What do the server and the agent run on?
The server runs in Docker (Compose) together with PostgreSQL. The agent is installed from the server as deb, rpm or tar.gz for Linux amd64 and arm64.
What is the license?
The server, agent, CLI and web UI are AGPL-3.0. The gRPC contracts and the plugin SDK are Apache-2.0, so third-party plugins can be written without AGPL obligations.
How much does it cost?
Community is free. Pro and MSP have no prices on the site; we discuss the terms in person.
How do I verify a release?
Agent releases are signed with minisign and the images in GHCR with cosign. Releases carry SBOMs and build provenance.