Flat storage (Snapshotless repository)

Forgive me if this is is totally stupid, or if this is already easily achieved. I’m not very well experienced with restic.

I use and enjoy rclone, but I also really like restic’s compression/deduplication.

I’d like to take advantage of that restic feature, but in such a way that I can just “upload” or add files to a repo without versioning, or snapshots of any sort. I really like being able to fuse mount a repo.

My dream would be able to fuse mount a repo that I could read/write on (likely using a mergerFS type setup with the local storage sending constantly to the restic repo)

Is this possible? (Forget the last part about my dream setup, just the repo that has no snapshots)

Here’s a related question I asked on the rclone forums,

Hi @mattzab and welcome to the restic community! :slight_smile: Glad you found your way here

Well technically restic does no compression. It does deduplication, yes, but no compression as of now.
Just wanted to point that out.

Restic works like git does. When you create a backup it will create a snapshot that references to that backup. It’s not just some “dumb” folder hierarchy if you mean that.
Maybe I am also missing something or am not giving you as much info but yeah it’s probably not going to work the way you want it to.

Thanks for the reply.

I am looking to achieve “dumb” folder hierarchy, but maybe snapshots would do the job, as long as I’m able to delete files/folders, and keep everything pruned so that I don’t end up with too many snapshots.

Well yeah you can always set up a forget policy to keep things tidy.
One thing to note is that once you have made a snapshot and you want to remove a file from that snapshot - you can’t.
You would have to dump the snapshot somewhere, remove the file and then create a new snapshot.
Just in case you thought you could just delete things after the fact.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. That won’t help for what I’m trying to accomplish.

Thanks for the info, I don’t think restic will quite work for what I’m looking for.

No problem :slight_smile: I will mark this one as solved then.

Restic could actually make a fantastic backend to a Document Management System - well CMS’s as they became. It would be more robust than some of the significant players out there! The dedupe etc. would be a major improvement on the flat file in a SQL database pointing to files in an S3 bucket which covers a lot of backends now.

It’s been some time.

Is anything like this possible, now? I’m still searching for a solution like this, I find it odd that nothing exists out there.

No, restic backs up your stuff using snapshots. That’s how it will most likely be for the foreseeable future as well.

Do you mind if I ask what the use case is, specifically? It doesn’t sound like you’re looking for a backup solution as such.

It sounds to me like you are looking for a deduplicating filesystem. Check out VDO, Lessfs, Albiero, ddumbfs or btrfs+bedup.

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  • VDO lives under the filesystem, that’s not what I want.
  • Lessfs is dead. Can’t use it.
  • Albiero seems to have become VDO.
  • btrfs is a full file system, I’m looking for something that could be fuse mounted.
  • ddumbfs works perfectly!

Thank you for these suggestions! I’ve been searching for months. Unfortunately, fusecompress is a dead project, but using that in conjunction with ddumbfs would have been the best solution.

You’re absolutely right, I’m looking for a deduplicating file system. Thank you for this post.

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