How to reverse and then integrate the last snapshot

Getting Help
1

Yesterday, I managed to subsequently backup my home and usr/dev/local directories, followed by /etc and /root. Unfortunately, I forgot that restic is a backup facility and not an archive facility, so I now have 2 snapshots, the first of which contains the main backup (home and usr/dev/local) and the second of which contains /root and /etc. Of course, I wanted both together as my backup. Now I have 2 option afaics:

  1. I can forget the last backup followed by a prune and a check.
  2. I can make a backup of all directories (using sudo for them all this time) and hope that the backup will use the files already backed up in snapshot 1, so I don’t have to copy all files again.

Anyone comment or improvements? Any ideas which is better? Is point 2 feasible?

2

2nd point is perfectly feasible, restic will not re-upload files which are already backed up and not changed. But it might need to read the files to determine this.

3

Thanks! I will give this a shot. I was afraid that as snapshot 2 did not have all those files, it would upload them again. But, I figure it uses some kind of pointers (layman terms) to use the snapshot 1 files.

Thanks for the response!

4

Well! That worked like swimming in an icehole on a cold wintermorning: very refreshing! Restic indeed did not copy a byte, both the root-files and the userfiles were checked and I guess sort-of refreshed. And non too slow to boot!!

Thank you, your answer was the solution!

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