Does Restic have tar "newer" features?

Getting Help
1

Hi all,

Does Restic have a feature like tar’s “newer” switches? See below. Besides piping a file list from tar or find to Restic. I couldn’t find it in the manual.

Reason for asking is in order to save costs, I am thinking of doing an annually backup to tape (and sending off-site) and then trickling what has changed since the tape backup to a cloud storage provider. Repeat annually.

Thank you.

     --newer date
             (c, r, u modes only) Only include files and directories newer
             than the specified date.  This compares ctime entries.

     --newer-mtime date
             (c, r, u modes only) Like --newer, except it compares mtime
             entries instead of ctime entries.

     --newer-than file
             (c, r, u modes only) Only include files and directories newer
             than the specified file.  This compares ctime entries.

     --newer-mtime-than file
             (c, r, u modes only) Like --newer-than, except it compares mtime
             entries instead of ctime entries.
2

The documentation is comprehensive - if backup --help doesn’t list a feature then it’s not present.

3

Yes, I think you’re right. Thanks. But I wasn’t sure if it was called something different, resulting in me not finding it.

4

There is no such feature in restic.
However, I didn’t really get your use case… The point is that restic is using deduplication to efficiently store the contents. This supersedes the traditional “incremental backup” strategy completely. Now you want to combine this with full backups to a tape and self-implement a incremental backup strategy?? This sounds really counter-intuitive to me and will most likely fail to give you the reliability you want for a backup…

Can you be more precise about what costs you want to save? Local storage? Cloud storage cost? Transfer cost?

1 Like
5

Here’s my use case.

I have about 5TB of data on the home server. My wife’s desktop and mine have NFS shares on it. Most of that data does not change, only a small subset does. I have several copies within the house.

The off-site backup is what I am looking at improving. Right now, I have it in B2. AWS S3 Glacier would be cheaper, but expensive to retrieve the whole lot. I now have an LTO5 tape drive for backing up separate lot of 4TB of media for life time storage, off-site.

So my thinking is to utilise the tape drive and the cheap tapes for an off-site backup of our 5TB of server/NFS data. As the majority of the data doesn’t change, tapes kept at family’s residences makes sense for the portion that doesn’t change (the majority). And then trickle the changes up to a cloud provider. Say, once a year, update the tapes with a full backup and wipe the cloud storage and repeat.

We could move no-longer-changing-data to a single folder in our NFS shares, say “archive” and use Restic to backup everything besides the archive and stick the archive folder onto tape. This would require some work from us to more data around and anything moved to archive, will no longer be backed up by Restic (and need to be put onto tape straight away, ideally). I was thinking technology can handle this for us though. Hence this thread.

That’s my thinking anyway. Happy to be shown this is a bad idea and there’s a better way.

6

Ahhh I think the --files-from-verbatim option, coupled with find -print will do exactly what I am after. Brilliant!

https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/040_backup.html#including-files