Backing up to an OwnCloud (WebDAV) backend

Hei there,

thank you for making restic! We’ve been using it extensively at work and it’s an amazing tool.

I would like to use restic for my private backups and I have access to a storage provider that is only accessible over WebDAV. Just to try it out, I mounted the provider from within Finder (I work on macos), and tried to initialize the repository with restic.

However, I receive the following error:

Fatal: create repository at /Volumes/.../Crypt failed: MkdirAll: mkdir /Volumes/.../Crypt/index: operation not permitted

I can get around the error if I create the directories index and data/00 manually, but the init procedure later dies anyway with the following error:

Fatal: create key in repository at /Volumes/.../Crypt failed: Sync: sync /Volumes/.../keys/<keyid>: inappropriate ioctl for device

I once tried to access the same provider with rclone, but there too I am getting errors. My question: is this a hopeless case, or is there anything I can set or do to make it work anyway?

Best,
Eleanor

As far as I know Finder is very bad tool to use for accessing WebDAV shares, if you want to use WebDAV in macOS in general I would recommend Cyberduck(.io) or Mountainduck(.io) depending on whether you want to mount the share or not.

That said, since restic doesn’t have a WebDAV backend of its own, but fully supports rclone as a backend, the proper way to use a WebDAV share with restic is to set it up using rclone and then use the rclone backend in restic.

If you are having problems accessing that WebDAV share, that’s what you need to debug and get working. Once you do that, you should be able to back up to it using restic :slight_smile:

Yes, Finder is extremely slow with WebDAV. Back when I was on macOS, I used Forklift for all network share access and it can mount shares as well. It’s not free but very much worth the money.