The current repository is a backup of an entire ~/home/ directory, containing two directories that made up the bulk of the data. I’ve since placed each directory in two separate partitions on an external drive. I’m wondering how to handle backups moving forward. I don’t believe there is a way to specify two sources to combine into a single backup. I’ve read the Backing up section in the documentation.
If I create two new repositories, I’ll need to delete some stuff to make room, then I’ll delete the old repository which means I can’t recover old snapshots. It’s not a big deal but if there’s a better solution where I can merge them, I’d like to know.
There is no reason to create two new repositories, you can continue backing up to the one you already have, and it would be beneficial to do so as you will then make use of deduplication.
There is actually one example of specifying multiple paths to back up at Backing up — restic 0.18.0 documentation , but I do realize that it’s not clearly mentioned. You could have just tried it to know that it works, or you could have read restic help backup which tells you restic backup [flags] [FILE/DIR] …, but it might be a good idea to add a simple explanation of this fact to the documentation. Are you interested in making a pull request for that?
Either way, just run your regular backup command with as many paths to back up as you wish, restic will back them all up in the same snapshot.
On a related note, when you later forget snapshots using a policy, you might need to use –group-by to make the policy consider the snapshots as one list, when you have different paths in your snapshots.