Initial backup almost doubled in size on B2 target

[yarcod]

Hi there!

I needed to setup some new backup solution recently, as my previous solution (Duplicati) broke down irreparably, and I turned to restic based on recommendations. I am still not sure exactly how it all works, and need to get more accustomed to the tool to feel fully confident in my new backup. As such, I’m terribly new to restic. Now to my issue.

I did an initial backup of my ~2,5TB of data to a B2 bucket, which took forever, but seems to have completed fine. I can see loads of data being uploaded to the remote bucket, but the size reported there is 4,4TB. It seems to my untrained eye that it is all located under the same repository (called “restic”), so I guess that means that this was done by that initial backup. But why is the size so big? How can I inspect and get more info about the remote files, and determine the cause?

Thanks in advance!

[bdillahu]

I don’t know that I can help with your initial question (doubled size), but there are a couple of threads you might want to read through:

Restic + Backblaze: best practice?

I currently backup various machines to a local server using the restic ssh backend. The server is raid1 and does daily rsync of the restic directory to a backup drive. The current restic volume is about 600GB. I have been also backing up the restic directory to Code 42. This worked great but in the last year, it has been lagging miserably. It’s $120/year. So, I’ve been thinking about ditching Code 42 in favor of Backblaze B2. I know that Backblaze usage has been discussed on and off in …

Safe to change B2 lifecycle settings?

Just to resurrect an old topic here… I found that if you are using rclone sync to send your backup to B2, you may want to also use the option: --b2-hard-delete Without this, even if you have “Keep only last version” set, when a file is deleted via the sync, a previous copy is kept. This may not be what you want. If you have been doing this, check out: https://rclone.org/b2/ for details. I found this command was useful to clean up the old versions I had that I didn’t want: rclone cleanup…

[tomwaldnz]

Suggest you do a backup locally to see what happens with space. You don’t have to back up the whole 2+TB. The backup shouldn’t be twice the size of the content, it should be about the same size, give or take.