It appears that restic has no way of piping multiple files to stdin of restic backup command, and also piping them back on stdout to restore them. Confirm or deny?
Piping multiple files to one snapshot is very useful because it means the data does not have to land on my disk first.
The only way possible to pipe multiple files to stdin and keep them in the same snapshot so I can refer to them as “latest” is to first combine them all into one tarball.
But then during restore you have to unpack them, which makes it quite complicated and forces me to store the tarball on disk.
In my case I am running podman volume export vol-name | restic backup --stdin --stdin-filename vol-name multiple times in a loop to backup all my podman volumes. But it’s impossible because they end up in different snapshots so when I want to restore I can’t just refer to “latest”.
And the alternative method here would be to merge all podman volumes into one big tarball, but then how do I restore them without first putting the tarball on my disk?
I’m just trying to confirm or deny before I move on to rustic which is an alternative client that seems to support what I need. But I’ve been using restic for many years already.
Also appears borg has an import-tar command that can unpack a tar and refer to individual tar files in one parent tar. But I think I’ll try rustic first.