Rclone mount gdrive backup

Getting Help
1

I’m using rclount mount gdrive: /mnt/gdrive to backup my google drive contents to sftp. So far it works quite good. But maybe it could work even better? I have a couple of questions:

  1. the gdrive data is ~500GB. It takes about 1h for each backup. If I rclone sync the data it takes ~5 min. Is that a restic problem or a mount problem?
  2. every time I do a new backup it says that about 500 files have changed – even at night when I know nobody touched anything. Is there a way for me to see which files changed? I usually do restic backup --quiet (which of course only outputs the summary). But if I leave out --quiet I get EVERYTHING in the logs, which is way too much. Is there a middlegroud?

Thanks for the help!

2

item 2: you can perform a diff to see the changes between snapshots. read this section in the documentation:
https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/040_backup.html#comparing-snapshots

3

Thanks! That helped. I can now see, that a lot of the files that change between backups are always the same files. They are native “google docs” (and not .docx/.xlsx/etc files). Rclone shows their size with “-1” (rclone ls gdrive:). Is there anything I can do to get these files to be “stable” between backup runs?
If I do ls -ashl /mnt/gdrive they look normal …

Update:
… until they don’t. If I do ls -ashl /mnt/gdrive again “after a while” (15min, but I don’t know) these files have now a size of 0 also. Strange.

4

So it seems like the solution for now is to do it in two steps:

First sync gdrive with rclone – this is the quickest solution to stabilize all google doc files.
rclone sync gdrive: sftp:current

and then mount that folder from sftp and do a backup with restic into a different folder on the sftp.

rclone mount --daemon sftp:current /mnt/sftp
restic backup -r sftp:user@url:/backup /mnt/sftp

And it is also WAY faster – snapshots now take ~11mins (10min for rclone and 1min for restic) where before it took ~70mins.