Can we see snapshot sizes?

[cdhowie]

@Cantello

Is there currently any way to get the same kind of details for the list of snapshots as with the new backup output?

Computing the size of each snapshot is a very time-consuming process since each tree must be visited to determine how large the snapshot is. Doing this for a list of a hundred snapshots would probably take an hour or so.

[Cantello]

Ok, thanks that bit I did not know. Will do with the individual stats then.

[fthdgn]

I found a solution to find space will be freed if a snapshot were removed.

1- Run restic prune --dry-run
2- Take note of sum “total prune” and “unused size after prune”
3- Run restic forget snapshotid --prune --dry-run
4- Take note of sum “total prune” and “unused size after prune”
5- The difference between the sums is the space will be freed if a snapshot were removed.

[fede]

@fthdgn Thanks for the info!

[huyz]

Should be available easily for all backups made starting with v0.17.0 and later: Store snapshot statistics & print snapshot size by MichaelEischer · Pull Request #4705 · restic/restic · GitHub

[noeck]

Wow that’s great news. Is there a timeline for 0.17 already? So far, I ran these four (time consuming) commands after each backup to gather statistics and store them:

• restic stats --json --mode raw-data
• restic stats --json --mode raw-data latest
• restic stats --json --mode restore-size
• restic stats --json --mode restore-size latest

From these some statistics can be derived but the linked pull request provides much more. Thank you!

[MichaelEischer]

restic 0.17.0 will still take some time (probably 2 months or more), I’m only halfway through with the planned features.

[FunctionDJ]

I’m running 0.17.3 but no size column when i use restic snapshots
What am i doing wrong?

Edit: Restic changelog for 0.17.0:

The snapshots command now prints the size for snapshots created using this or a future restic version

That explains it.

[GuitarBilly]

@FunctionDJ i guess you updated restic but did not make a new backup. This new feature works fine with 0.17.3, albeit that all backups made with prior versions <17.0 will show no data in the size column as there is no data stored in the repository.

Going back to the original question, one can also achieve snapshot size information (“how much storage my snapshots are taking”) if you set up metrics monitoring. For example with Prometheus and a Grafana dashboard.
There are various tools who can help with that, including rest-server. Some solutions are already discussed on this forum:

Restic grafana dashboard

With the 0.9.5 release we can now stream JSON output during backup operations. I had a quick play with my ‘TIG’ stack at home and was able to display some interesting metrics very easily. I’d be curious to know if anyone has done anything similar/better as I’m little more than a beginner with such things. [2019-05-02%2010_33_09-Restic%20-%20Grafana] Thanks for this new feature

Then you can get something like this example, the npbackup dashboard:

p.s. Also metrics monitoring will not generate/show data for backups made in the past.