I’ve run already 3 snapshots with tag “manual”. The ~450GB server data should already be all on AWS S3.
Those backups did not take longer than ~10 hours.
Today, I am testing the first automatic backup, with tag “daily”.
However, it’s been running already since 7:00, and it’s currently past 22:00 (15h+).
I wouldn’t expect such “incremental” backup to take so long.
Is this normal, to take longer than the first backup?
Is this because the tag name is different? (re-uploading everything?)
Is there a way I can see what’s the progress, how much already uploaded, etc?
This is most likely why it’s taking so long, but it’s not re-uploading everything.
Restic looks for a so-called “parent” snapshot. It compares metadata with the parent to decide what it can safely skip. For example, a file with the same exact name, size, timestamps, ownership, permissions, etc. is seen as not changed without ever looking at its contents.
Without a parent snapshot, restic chunks and hashes every single file, just as before – however, it will find most of those chunks in the repository index already, so it will deduplicate them and not re-upload them. However, it still has to do the expensive work of hashing every single byte that is being backed up to determine if it’s in the repository.
A parent snapshot can be specified with the --parent option. If one is not specified, restic looks for the most recent snapshot with exactly the same hostname, path set, and tag set. Since you are using a different tag set, no parent is located so restic cannot use the fast metadata-comparison path.
Either use the same tags or use --parent to pick a specific prior snapshot you would like to use as the basis for comparison.