How to init in Windows 10 restic-repo into external drive?

I’ve put up and running repo’s into external drives both in Linux Ubuntu and Manjaro, in both repo’s work as designed. Now I’m trying to make the same in Win 10 which has backup from MS One Drive. Challenge: Win 10 installs repo with all sub-volumes always into C:\Users\pc directory with name ‘epo’ and Terminal does not even inform about it nor the place and does not seem to care about command to init repo into external drive. How to overcome this ?

Could someone advice restic init --repo … … … restic-repo command, which is capable to make Windows 10 to install repo into into external drive connected to Win 10 and has been into NTFS.

Edit: I found advice I was looking for in article and it seems to solve the challenge with restin in Windows 10: Backup with restic

This doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. First off, Windows doesn’t create your restic repository, restic does. And restic creates that repository where you tell it to create that repo, so if you tell it to create a repo in e.g. the path D:\foo then that’s where restic will create it (assuming you have permissions to create files and folders there, of course).

What command did you use when trying to create the repository and observing the behavior you describe? Please include the full command and all of its output :slight_smile:

I see you found an article that showed you how to create a repo, although the correct syntax would be to put the --repo option before the init command, so the proper command would be restic --repo D:\foo init as opposed to what’s in that article.

Again, Windows 10 does not “install” a repository. Everything restic related happens when you run the restic application, Windows doesn’t have anything to do with that other than perhaps when you schedule restic runs yourself.

Can you please also tell us where you downloaded restic? I hope you didn’t happen to come across some third party download of it - you should get the restic binaries from the official sources such as GitHub - restic/restic: Fast, secure, efficient backup program .

PS: A restic repository is just a collection of folders and files, nothing special. That’s why you can put it anywhere you want in your regular filesystem.

@rawtaz Thank you very much for reply and advice ! I installed restic according to Manual (Installation — restic 0.12.1 documentation) after installing at first Scoop using Windows PowerShell with command ‘scoop install restic’.

From very beginning I got it working OK as application with repo inside Windows c:/. But I messed up in making repo into external drive due to my wrong path commands.

Now, after implementing your advice, restic-repo is in external drive, picture here below. All restic functions (backup, listing, check, restore, forget - I’ve not yet tested more) work OK. :grinning:

I restored one snapshot into C:\Windows\Temp directory.

hi,
There is a lot of information on restic when using Windows. Click on the magnifying glass icon to do a search on “windows”. The thing I comment on the most is to remember to tell your virus checking program to ignore the restic executable otherwise it will run slower. I used my restic backups on an external usb hard drive to migrate by restoring files on a new system.