Missing snapshots from repository - unable to restore

Getting Help
1

Hi!
I am trying to restore files from an one year old repository (1,05 GB), however I am running into unexpected problems. It seems like the data exists in the repository, but I can’t get it because no snapshots exists.

For reference, restic version is

restic 0.9.5 compiled with go1.12.4 on darwin/amd64
(Note I am running Mac OS X 10.13.6)

First, trying to list snapshots gives no results:

restic -r /Users/andrei/Desktop/rts snapshots
enter password for repository:
repository bd841afb opened successfully, password is correct

I suspect something is wrong, so I run restic check:

restic -r /Users/andrei/Desktop/rts check
using temporary cache in /var/folders/4s/9t9l7vqj7kj2cnlxwnyt8mwm0000gn/T/restic-check-cache-747955570
enter password for repository:
repository bd841afb opened successfully, password is correct
created new cache in /var/folders/4s/9t9l7vqj7kj2cnlxwnyt8mwm0000gn/T/restic-check-cache-747955570
create exclusive lock for repository
load indexes
check all packs
check snapshots, trees and blobs
no errors were found

Then I also run rebuild-index

restic -r /Users/andrei/Desktop/rts rebuild-index
enter password for repository:
repository bd841afb opened successfully, password is correct
counting files in repo
[0:00] 100.00%  192 / 192 packs
finding old index files
saved new indexes as [e754437f]
remove 0 old index files

I suspect maybe this is because there is a incomplete snapshot, so I run restic recovery:

restic -r /Users/andrei/Desktop/rts recover
enter password for repository:
repository bd841afb opened successfully, password is correct
load index files
load 0 trees
done
found 0 roots
saved new snapshot cf75bd93

However, as the output says, the new snapshot is empty. I don’t remember forgetting and pruning the repository, so I am not sure what this does mean. Is the repository corrupted? Is there a way to recover those files?

2

Hmm… is it possible that whatever backup ran never finished? That would explain why there is no snapshot and could explain why there are no trees.

The problem with recovering this data is that it sounds like all you have are data blobs. Without trees, there are no names or structure to this data. All of the data is there but you have no idea which blobs go to which filenames; indeed, you don’t even have any filenames. Some files that were backed up might have their data split into multiple blobs and you can’t know which ones now because there’s no trees.

3

Frankly I am not even sure. I suppose this might be the reason. I was just unsure of exactly what has happened, but your reply has made it clear, thank you!