Designing a Restore-First Desktop Backup Tool Around Restic (From Bash Script to Qt/C++)

Reflections on trust, restore safety, threading, and building a desktop orchestration layer around a CLI engine. Backups Are Easy. Restores Are Not. Taking backups is usually simple. Restoring them — confidently, correctly, and without hesitation — is where anxiety begins. Over time, I realized that most tools are designed around creating backups . Very few are designed around restoring safely . And psychologically, restore confidence is what really matters. This realization is what led me from a small Bash script wrapped in KDialog to a full multithreaded Qt/C++ desktop application built around restic . Phase 1: The Script That Solved One Problem The first version of this project was nothing more than: A Bash script Hardcoded include paths restic CLI calls KDialog progress dialogs It removed repetitive typing. That was enough — for a while. But as I started using restic to manage configuration state (Docker stacks, system configs, reverse proxies, etc.), new requirements emerged: Mult