Feedback: First Experience With Restic Compression

1

Hi all,

No request for help, just some positive feedback:

As my backup disk ran out of space, I just convinced myself to upgrade from the restic version shipped with my distribution to the latest stable release.

I then enabled compression on the repository and recompressed all packs with maximum compression.

The backed up system is my main work machine, where I do lots of software development, have some databases stored, but also a bunch of less compressible office documents (already zipped internally) and media files.

These were the results:

==> restic_v1_size.txt <==
1,9T    restic/

==> restic_v2_size_1_after_conversion.txt <==
1,9T    restic/

==> restic_v2_size_2_with_compression.txt <==
971G    restic/

There was probably some unused data in the packs before the recompression, however at most 100G.

So repository compression is really a HUGE win for actual real world cases, not just for specifically tuned benchmark situations.

That’s really great, thanks a lot for the great feature and the continuous and consistent work on restic!

9 Likes
2

My backup size went from around 450 GB to 280 GB - and I even store more data in it now.
Simply amazing!

3 Likes
3

Thanks for sharing this. I wouldn’t have thought about this. I will want to consider using the compression parameter for my first big backup then! When you do a restore, does restic decompress automatically or do you have to mention another parameter that in the command?

4

It’s all automatic, there is no difference in using the repository when you have compression enabled.

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