Pause Restic backup? Recover backup from crash?

Getting Help
1

I’m on Ubuntu 21.04 on a 1 month old Ryzen 7 gaming laptop. Running Restic 0.12

  1. I looked thru the Restic command list and didn’t see how to pause/resume a Restic backup. Any way to do that?

  2. I’m now doing my initial Restic backup (only 21 hrs left). I’m backing up 1TB of user files to an external USB connected spinning hard drive. What happens to this backup if my computer crashes? Any way to resume/recover a Restic backup from a crash?

2

Pausing is still not an option, but it’s safe to cancel an ongoing backup. Time-wise it might not be lightning-fast since it still needs to scan the files on second run to check if there are any differences, but at least it won’t try to re-upload already saved chunks.

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3

Good news. What is the command to cancel a Restic backup job? Just ctrl-c? Is Restic smart and does it know how to properly and safely cancel a backup job? Or will ctrl-c cause Restic to create corrupted files?

So what happens if my pc crashes? Can I start the same Restic backup job again and it will skip all the files that have already been backed up? Or will a crash cause Restic to create corrupted files?

Request for the Restic devs: Implement pause/resume functionality. Thx.

4

Yep, or if you’d like to kill it with other tropical methods :grimacing:

It does its tasks in correct order, so it’s near-impossible to break something by cancelling a restic process. At least on later versions.

It’s fine as long as repository itself is not corrupted meanwhile (e.g. filesystem issues).

Already on its way

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5

Hmm… I like it. Consider me the Lord Voldemort of Linux newbies.

6

Thanks. Sounds like Restic is reasonably robust. Nice. Especially when I’m doing a 40hr backup job.

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