Hi,
Just found in a list of Timeshift alternatives. Platform is W10.
My question is: can restic do snapshots in the manner of Timeshift? That is, where you can keep many snapshots of how the backup source location looked a few minutes or hours or days or weeks ago… without duplicating huge amounts of files.
Timeshift in Linux does this brilliantly, using hard links. In W10 we don’t have that option.
If restic can’t do this, any recommendations for an alternative would be much appreciated.
Yes, that is correct. If you schedule a backup run with restic e.g. every hour, then you will have a snapshot for each of those points in time, and that snapshot will contain a representation of what the files you backed up looked like at those points in time.
Just note that you need to actually run restic at those points in time - you can’t just start restic and it will keep backing up things over time as they change - you have to run it every time you want there to be a snapshot.
Also note that you don’t want to keep your snapshots around forever, so you should periodically run the forget and prune commands to maintain your repository so it doesn’t grow endlessly.
Yes, restic deduplicates what it backs up, so two identical blocks of data will be sent and stored just once.
Restic uses a more sophisticated method for storing the data than hard links, and it’s all well documented e.g. here: References — restic 0.16.3 documentation
Great. Thanks.