I am starting to use Restic and have a specific question. Here is the scenario:
I have a Windows server with 2 TB of data (organized in various folders) that I need to upload to an S3 bucket. Due to my slow Internet connection, I plan to proceed as follows:
Copy the 2 TB of data to a portable SSD.
Take the SSD to a location with a fast Internet connection and set up the S3 repository.
Perform a full backup from the SSD to the S3 repository.
Return to the Windows server and configure Restic to do incremental backups to the same S3 repository, so only the modified files are uploaded.
My question is: is this procedure feasible? Will Restic recognize the data already uploaded during the initial backup from the SSD and only upload the modified files from the Windows server, or will it attempt to re-upload all 2 TB of data?
Restic will not upload all 2 TB of data, it will only upload what has changed since last time, and also any metadata that might be different. You should have success with the intended procedure.
Haha i knew what your plan was after 1. And yup, Restic is smart enough that it wont reup the same data. It will recognize. However, the first backup from the server may be slow cus restic needs to rescan files. But it wont actually transfer or upload files.
Really great news! I was pessimistic because I thought that changing the source host (SSD connected to another machine/host) would change some metadata, and therefore Restic would see them as new files.
So, I will proceed without setting any special commands, just configuring the repo.
I’ll keep you updated!
You can even backup files from multiple machines to one repo and the same files/file parts will be deduplicated. I have my music collection on multiple machines backing up to one repo and they only get counted once.
hehehheeh