I have several terabytes being backed up by restic, and due to some pending infrastructure changes I’m looking at making, I want to update the Ownership and permissions of most of the files. Will doing this force all of the files to be completely re-uploaded, or is the metadata of files backed up separately from the files themselves?
Meta-information is part of tree (directory) objects, not the file data objects themselves.
However, note that there is currently a bug that prevents ownership/permission changes from being picked up if they are the only changes.
A workaround would be to update the mtime on each file (touch everything in the directory tree) which will force restic to look at each file again. The data will not be reuploaded (the “new” files will be 100% deduplicated by the old files) but the restic client will have to re-hash every file to determine that the contents haven’t changed.
Excellent, thanks so much for the quick reply.