Download charges

In what instances could there be expensive ($) downloads from a repo when working with restic? To my understanding, if I run check —read-data, restic will download my entire repo to verify integrity, which could be expensive if were paying a $/GB for download bandwidth from a cloud storage provider depending on the repo size. Are there any other commands or situations (excluding intentional retrivals/restores) that could result in unexpected download charges in addition to check —read-data?

The only other situations that comes to my mind are:

  • Running prune (which will download and repack/reupload data)
  • Running each backup in a new container without preserving the local cache created by restic (in ~/.cache/restic by default), so restic need to rebuild the cache and download the files every time a new backup is to be created.

Anything else I missed?

Great, this is helpful.

It might be useful to document these instances somewhere officially as a result of 1) most cloud providers charge for download bandwidth and 2) many residential ISPs have implemented 1TB monthly data caps in recent years and charge for overages. If someone moves their repository and wasn’t aware of the cache for example, depending on the repo size they could get hit with both large download charges from the cloud and overage charges from the ISP unexpectedly.

Great work by the way, definitely a first class product that is well maintained.

Edit: Happy to submit a PR of the 3 items listed above if helpful, I just can’t attest to the completeness of the list and may not be able to provide detailed explanations beyond the above.