I have an Android phone which I take photos. If the phone has infinite space, it is possible to simply run restic to backup from phone to backend (say, a HDD). However, the phone storage is not large, so I hope to delete old photos in the phone, while making HDD store all the photos. Therefore, I wonder whether this is possible or best to be solved with restic?
I come up with a few naive thoughts:
use restic snapshot, and then delete old photos on phone. the shortcoming is, if one day I delete “outdated” snaphots, then I lose old photos! this is not acceptable
just use old school cp (or rsync or whatever) to copy the raw image files from phone to HDD. then do not use restic here, and lost its benefits, such as encryption.
Restic is a backup program which you use to 1) backup your important files 2) so that you can restore them when disaster strikes. I do not think it is wise to use it for archival purposes, which is what I think you are after.
Since this is an Android phone you have to already have a Google account. There are setting on the phone to control backups. You should have this set to take place and include photos in the backup. Their is another setting that controls whether the photos should be backed up at their original quality or compressed; I would recommend original quality.
From there I would copy to your computer, either directly from the phone or from the cloud (your photos are backed up to google drive.
Use restic to back up your computer, including the directory you copy photos to.
In the long term you will have two full backups, one on your computer and one in your restic backup. You will also have backups on the phone and in your google account, but as you noted the moment you start deleting photos from the phone, these will be out of sync with your computer and it’s back up…