Hello,
I just installed a new OS (Linux) on my computer and I no longer have the index files that restic stores in the local .cache directory.
I would now like to continue to backup my machine to my Backblaze B2 account, but I’m wondering what is the most efficient way of doing this from the standpoint of downloading the fewest number of files from B2?
Due to cost, I would like to keep the number of transactions and data downloaded from B2 to a minimum.
Thanks!
Make a backup and use restic normally. Yes, it’s that easy :). restic will download all files it needs on demand and populate the cache directory. At the moment, restic 0.8.3 (the latest release) is already optimized to cause the least number of transactions. When you first request a single small blob stored in a file, it’ll pull down the whole file, because it’s likely that you’ll need other blobs from the same file. It will only access the file once.
You can easily test this by running restic snapshots, it’ll only download the files in snapshots. Then you can use restic ls latest for example, it’ll download everything it needs to list the latest snapshots: Files in index/ and metadata files in data/.
Thanks! I like that “it’s that easy”. 