Quickstart

This guide gets you started in minutes. You’ll create your first backup snapshot, verify it’s secure, and learn how to restore your files.

Plakar makes backups simple and secure by default. Every backup is end-to-end encrypted, deduplicated to save space, and stored as an independent snapshot you can restore at any time—without depending on previous backups.

If you’ve used traditional backup tools, here’s what’s different: instead of incremental archives that chain together, Plakar creates self-contained snapshots. You can delete old snapshots without breaking newer ones, compare any two snapshots directly, and trust that your data is tamper-evident and encrypted before it ever leaves your machine.

Requirements

Make sure plakar is installed on your system. If you haven’t done this yet, please refer to the Installation guide for detailed instructions.

Create a Kloset Store

Before we can back up any data, we need to define where the backup will go. In plakar terms, this storage location is called a Kloset Store. This is where Plakar keeps your backups. Think of it like a safe folder for snapshots. You can find out more about the concept and rationale behind Kloset in this post on our blog.

For our first backup, we will create a local Kloset Store on the filesystem of the host OS. In a real backup scenario you would want to store backups on a different physical device, so substitute in a better location if you have one.

In your terminal, run the following command:

$ plakar at $HOME/backups create

plakar will then ask you to enter a passphrase, and repeat it to confirm.

Your passphrase is important!

Be extra careful when choosing the passphrase: People with access to the Kloset Store and knowledge of the passphrase can read your backups.

By default plakar will enforce rules on your choice of passphrase to make sure it is complex enough to be secure. To add complexity, use a mixture of upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols.

DO NOT LOSE OR FORGET THE PASSPHRASE: it is not stored anywhere and cannot be recovered in case of loss. A lost passphrase means the data within the repository can no longer be accessed or recovered.

Create your first backup

Now that we have created the Kloset Store where data will be stored, we can use it to create our first backup. plakar uses the at keyword to specify the Kloset Store to use.

To create a simple example backup, try running:

$ plakar at $HOME/backups backup $HOME/Documents

This backs up your Documents folder into the $HOME/backups. Replace the paths with any folder or storage location you prefer to do plakar operations on.

plakar will process the files it finds at that location (in this case the Documents folder) and pass them to the Kloset where they will be chunked and encrypted.

The output will indicate the progress:

dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/Obsidian/NOTES.md
dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/budget.xlsx
dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/notes.txt
[...]
dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents
dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user
dd62691d: OK ✓ /home
dd62691d: OK ✓ /
info: backup: created unsigned snapshot dd62691d of size 6.4 KiB in 125.317267ms (wrote 577 KiB)

The output lists the short form of the snapshot ID. This is used to identify a particular snapshot and is also how you identify the snapshot to use for various plakar commands.

Command help

Learning new tools can be confusing. To make things easier, plakar includes built-in help for all commands. Just use plakar help and then the command you need help with for a full list of options and examples. For example, if you forget what the options are for restoring files from a snapshot: plakar help restore

List snapshots

You can verify that the backup exists with the ls command, which returns the backups in that Kloset Store:

$ plakar at $HOME/backups ls
2026-01-14T06:45:32Z   dd62691d   6.4 KiB        0s /home/user/Documents

The output lists the date of the last backup, the short UUID, the size of files backed-up, the time it took to create the backup and the source path of the backup.

Verify integrity

It’s always a good idea to verify the integrity of your backups. You can do this with the check command. This will read back the data from the Kloset Store, decrypt it and verify its integrity by recomputing checksums.

$ plakar at $HOME/backups check dd62691d
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/Obsidian
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/code_samples
[...]
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/Obsidian/NOTES.md
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/recipes/ingredients.csv
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/resume.pdf
info: dd62691d: ✓ /home/user/Documents/project_proposal.docx
info: check: verification of dd62691d:/home/user/Documents completed successfully

In production, you would typically run this command periodically to ensure the integrity of your backups over time. This is necessary to ensure that data has not degraded or become corrupted while stored.

Restore files from a backup

You can restore files from a backup using the restore command. In this case, we are restoring the snapshot we just created to another directory called restored.

$ plakar at $HOME/backups restore -to $HOME/restored dd62691d
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/Obsidian
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/budget.xlsx
[...]
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/recipes/desserts.txt
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/recipes/dinner.txt
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/resume.pdf
info: dd62691d: OK ✓ /home/user/Documents/recipes/ingredients.csv
info: restore: restoration of dd62691d:/home/user/Documents at /home/user/restored completed successfully

To verify the files have been re-created, list the directory they were restored to. Note that the properties of the restored files, such as timestamps and permissions, will match the original files:

$ ls -l $HOME/restored/Documents/
total 36
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   30 Jan 14 06:31 budget.xlsx
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jan 14 06:31 code_samples
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   28 Jan 14 06:31 notes.txt
[...]
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   36 Jan 14 06:31 presentation.pptx
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   40 Jan 14 06:31 project_proposal.docx
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jan 14 06:31 recipes
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   29 Jan 14 06:31 resume.pdf

Access the UI

Plakar provides a web interface to view the backups and their content. To start the web interface, run:

$ plakar at $HOME/backups ui

Your default browser will open a new tab. You can navigate through the snapshots, search and view the files, and download them.

A public instance of the web UI is also available at https://demo.plakar.io. You can use it to explore the features of the UI on real backups without installing anything.

Congratulations!

You have successfully:

• created a backup
• verified it
• restored files
• used the graphical UI

How long did it take? This is how easy plakar is for simple, secure backups.

Next steps

Having a backup on the filesystem is a start, but to improve the durability of your backups, you should consider hosting multiple copies in different locations.

Continue to the Part 2 of the Quickstart to create multiple copies of your backups.