Weird use case from a newbie: I’d like to add a folder to an existing remote repo, without having to download the remote repo. It would be simply an addition of guaranteed-new content. Basically I would be using restic for deduplication and storage rather than actual backups or restores. Is this feasible? Is there an “ignore”-like option that would achieve this?
I’m not sure I understand you right. You can just backup any additional folder to the same repo any time you want. It’ll be in there as an additional, fully deduplicated snapshot.
I could achieve a version of this by adding a new repo instead of a folder; it’s just that I’d like to take advantage of deduplication and that seems to be repo-specific.
I was probably unclear! {8’> The machine adding the folder will not have the data from the remote repo on it at all. It will only have content from the new folder. I don’t want to take a new snapshot that excludes all other previously available folders–though I guess that would actually work in my case, as the app actually doing this manages single files one at a time.
Yes that is no problem. Maybe try it out locally to understand better what happens:
restic -r testrepo init
restic -r testrepo backup /foo
restic -r testrepo backup /bar
restic -r testrepo snapshots
You will then have one snapshot of each folder. If they come from two different computers, you’ll have two different snapshots from two different computers. It won’t matter.