Need help with Restore issue

Getting Help
1

Hi,

I’m looking for some advice/explanation of the proper restore procedure. I’m using this command on my Mac laptop:

restic -r s3:https://s3.amazonaws.com/my-bucket restore 3704db23 --target /Users/my-user-name/projects/my-project/folder/subfolder/My\ Photos --include /construction\ work/2009/01.12.09

The ideas is to restore /construction\ work/2009/01.12.09 into /Users/my-user-name/projects/my-project/folder/subfolder/My\ Photos folder, but no matter what folders I add into --include or even if I use --path "/my-path/my-file", the result is the same, the restored folder structure completely duplicates entire folder structure of the --target parameter inside the target path, here’s the resulted folder structure:

/Users/my-user-name/projects/my-project/folder/subfolder/My\ Photos/Users/my-user-name/projects/my-project/folder/subfolder/My\ Photos/construction\ work/2009/01.12.09.

Does this happens because I didn’t escape the folder names properly (empty spacing, dots, etc?)

Any help or tips will be much appreciated.

Thank you.

2

To discover right restore target I do the following procedure:

  • restic ls 3704db23 to list files and structure in repo
  • --target is prefixed to structure shown with restic ls

Example:

  • restic ls 3704db23 shows files like /projects/my-project/CHANGELOG.md
  • I would like to restore to /home/foobar/projects/my-project/ the --target /home/foobar must be specified

When your entire folder structure is duplicated, setting --target / should do the trick.

3

Thank you for the tip and explanation, it does work.

Interesting observation. When I tried to use restic ls 3704db23 to list all the folders/files in the snapshot it doesn’t show all the folder and files, some folders that are in the snapshot for some reason are not listed. Why is that?

4

I’d strongly suggest to simply restore the files to a temporary folder and move them to the correct place afterwards.

Currently, there’s no option to tell restore to only restore a subfolder. The --include option only selects which parts of a folder structure should be restored, but that implicitly also includes all parent folders.
Add support for snapshot:path syntax by MichaelEischer · Pull Request #4334 · restic/restic · GitHub will add an option to only restore a specific subfolder.

That shouldn’t be possible. Did you check using mount/restore that this is indeed the case.

1 Like