Hi,
my setup was that I have a remote server from which I want to backup certain directories to my local USB drive. Previously, I used rsync to copy the files, create a new btrfs snapshot and delete snapshots that are older than a certain amount of days.
However, I like restic more (all other backups of my systems are with restic), so I want to migrate.
I think I already migrated the snapshots (with the --time setting for the correct dates and the --parent to select the correct parent). The repo path is /media/backup-drive.
The snapshots are listed correctly, however, with their full path in the path column:
$ restic snapshots
ID Time Paths
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
9988ade4 2023-01-01 00:00:00 /media/backup-drive/_SNAPSHOTS/2023-01-01
8ed49944 2023-02-01 00:00:00 /media/backup-drive/_SNAPSHOTS/2023-02-01
47280a40 2023-03-01 00:00:00 /media/backup-drive/_SNAPSHOTS/2023-03-01
f392a1d7 2023-04-01 00:00:00 /media/backup-drive/_SNAPSHOTS/2023-04-01
29e55e7a 2023-05-01 00:00:00 /media/backup-drive/_CURRENT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
18 snapshots
I believe this works as intended because the later snapshots were much quicker and I could see that only modified files were copied. These directories contained only the folders home/myremoteuser and data/myremoteuser.
I have create the snapshots inside the respective folder like this:
cd /media/backup-drive/_SNAPSHOTS/2023-02-01
restic backup --parent 9988ade4 --time="2023-02-01 00:00:00" .
Now, for the first real backup, I have mounted the remote via rclone mount remote:/ /remote and I’m running the backup with:
cd /remote
restic backup \
--parent 29e55e7a \
--exclude-file=excludes.txt \
--files-from includes.txt
The excludes.txt contains only **/*.py[cd], and the includes.txt my two directories:
home/myremoteuser
data/myremoteuser
So, my question is two-fold: First, is this approach the best-practice? Do I benefit from incremental updates with this?
And second, I’m doubting it works correctly because it is reading all files from the remote which it doesn’t need to because I know that there were not many changes between now and the last snapshot.
The dry-run tells me that I’ll take around 6 hours for the backup.
When looking at the output of the --verbose=2 setting, I can see that many files are listed as modified, however, I know that I didn’t touch these files, and I tells me that with
modified /home/myremoteuser/arandomfile saved in 0.017s (0 B added, 0 B stored).
Could this be a remnant of the btrfs inode strategy and subsequent backups will be much faster or am I doing this wrong?
Additionally, with rsync, it only copied the files that were newer than locally. Does this work with a local rclone mount via SFTP? If it has to transfer all files (~1 TB) for each backup, I guess that this might not be the best backup strategy?
$ restic version
restic 0.15.2 compiled with go1.20.3 on linux/amd64