Efficient check for unchanged source?

[doscott]

This post shows two methods of getting a diff on two snapshots:

Restic logfile - list only changed files?

There are several topics in the forum that have methods of getting the changed/added/deleted listing. The following works for me. I use this at the end of the bash script for backups. The script is executed as a cron job so I get the results emailed to myself. If there aren’t a lot of changes then running it from a console is satisfactory. PREV=$(/usr/bin/restic snapshots --compact | tail -4 | head -1 | awk '{print $1}') LAST=$(/usr/bin/restic snapshots --compact | tail -3 | head -1 | awk '{pri…

With either method you should be able to parse the output to check if changes were made and then forget the snapshot if no changes were made.

This is the output of the first method:
comparing snapshot 58f478ad to e7670c62:

M    /home/dos/.bash_history
-    /home/dos/gitlab/backups/1616036714_2021_03_18_13.4.4_gitlab_backup.tar
-    /home/dos/gitlab/backups/1616123114_2021_03_19_13.4.4_gitlab_backup.tar
+    /home/dos/gitlab/backups/1616727914_2021_03_26_13.10.0_gitlab_backup.tar
-    /home/dos/gitlab/secrets/etc-gitlab-\1616641514.tgz
+    /home/dos/gitlab/secrets/etc-gitlab-\1616727914.tgz
M    /home/dos/mysql/APM_Forum.sql
M    /home/dos/mysql/mysql.sql
M    /home/dos/mysql/scottfamily.sql
M    /media/data/documents/Finance/MyMoney.kmy
M    /media/data/documents/Investing/Investing.ods
M    /root/.dbus/session-bus/c8cb0a3a1e0e4971b0874c39f9bbec3c-0
M    /root/.vnc/config.d/vncserver-x11
M    /root/.vnc/config.d/vncserver-x11.d/BootstrapCache.pkg
M    /root/.vnc/config.d/vncserver-x11.d/CloudCredentials.bed
M    /root/.vnc/config.d/vncserver-x11.d/RegionCache.bed

Files:           2 new,     3 removed,    11 changed
Dirs:            0 new,     0 removed
Others:          0 new,     0 removed
Data Blobs:     18 new,    23 removed
Tree Blobs:   6356 new,  6356 removed
  Added:   64.984 MiB
  Removed: 72.997 MiB