Highball

Web-based backup orchestrator that actually knows if your backups will work before they run.

Highball orchestrates rsync and Restic backups across multiple hosts with conflict-aware scheduling, real-time validation, and unified browsing. If you've been cobbling together cron jobs and shell scripts hoping your backups work, this replaces all of that with one container.

What Makes This Different

Pre-flight Everything – Every SSH connection, repository, and binary gets validated before jobs run. No more discovering auth failures at 3 AM.

Conflict-Aware Scheduling – Won't launch jobs that step on each other. Queues them automatically instead of silent failures.

Provider-Agnostic UI – Browse Restic snapshots and rsync directories with the same interface. No context switching between tools.

Multi-Path Jobs – Backup multiple related directories to the same destination with per-path include/exclude rules. One job, multiple sources.

Container Execution – Uses official restic/restic containers on remote hosts for version consistency. No binary management headaches.

Smart Restore System – Restore to source locations or safe container directories with intelligent overwrite protection and dry-run previews.

Spam-Prevention Notifications – Telegram and email alerts with queue batching so success notifications don't become a machine gun.

As far as we know, no other self-hosted backup frontend combines this level of multi-provider orchestration, validation, and conflict management in one place.

Quick Start

Container-only. Don't open issues if you're not running containerized.

# This will work at beta release.
#
# docker-compose.yml
services:
  highball:
    image: ghcr.io/ja2ui0/highball:latest
    container_name: highball
    ports:
      - "8087:8087"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./logs:/var/log/highball
      - ~/.ssh:/root/.ssh:ro  # for SSH key access
    restart: unless-stopped

docker compose up -d

Browse to http://localhost:8087 and start building jobs.

Requirements

You bring:

• SSH key access to your hosts
• rsync on source/destination systems
• docker/podman on hosts for Restic jobs (auto-detected)

Highball handles the rest.

Architecture

Pure orchestration layer – Highball SSH's to your hosts and runs binaries there. Never acts as a data intermediary. This enables any host → any destination with just coordination overhead.

Sources: SSH hosts, local filesystem
Destinations: SSH hosts, local filesystem, rsync daemons, Restic repositories
Providers: rsync (mature), Restic (complete), Kopia (planned)

Development

git clone https://github.com/ja2ui0/highball.git
cd highball
./rr  # rebuild and restart

See CLAUDE.md for architecture details and development guidelines.

License

GPLv3