Why I built a self-hosted centralized backup manager

There’s no shortage of backup tools. But none of them gave me a simple way to manage backups across multiple machines from one place, so I built my own. This is the architecture behind it. The problem I was managing backups for a small setup: two servers, a handful of Docker containers, and a few directories that needed regular backups. What I wanted was simple: one place to see all backups clear visibility on what ran, when, and whether it succeeded metrics like transferred data and snapshot size SSO support via OIDC, since my stack already runs behind Zitadel There was also another constraint in the background: compliance. I had started evaluating what would be needed to align with ISO 27001, and backup visibility, traceability, and centralized control quickly became non-negotiable. Backrest was the closest match I found. It’s well built, and Restic is rock solid underneath. The problem is that Backrest is still single-machine. You deploy one instance per server, and each one has its