Ok to set RESTIC_CACHE_DIR to external drive?

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1

Is it a bad idea to put the huge RESTIC_CACHE_DIR on an external SSD?
I’m wondering if there are performance implications and/or robustness implications (I sometimes accidentally unplug the drive without properly stopping restic and ejecting the disk)

restic 0.18.0 compiled with go1.24.2 on darwin/arm64

2

It’s fine to do that. You will be bound by the performance of accessing that disk instead of accessing whatever else you’d put the cache dir on otherwise.

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3

It is even recommended to put it on ram-disk. Restic will initialize it every time it got lost after a reboot.
export RESTIC_CACHE_DIR=/dev/shm/restic-cache

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