Brilliant program, big thanks to all who’ve developed it.
Some feedback for the installation documentation (guide) for Debian (ubuntu).
The Debian section, while giving a warning about apt-get’s outdated version, doesn’t suggest or give a link to the precompiled binaries. Now I’m a noob but not helpless. I spent a lot of time wrestling with apt-get to even get restic installed…and when I did, it was suffering from those speed problems other Backblaze users were noting from way back. Obviously this was version related (as the solutions suggested).
I know very little about the inner workings of these systems, so I’ll assume that in wrestling with that first version of restic I got pip to install correctly. (Had a lot of problems with getting around a pip error…but I think that was a backblaze specific error, not restic per se).
Regardless, after a long route with giving up and going back to duplicity…then frustrated with duplicity going back to restic: I removed restic through apt-get and just installed one of the precompiled binaries.
The precompiled binary was extremely fast to setup, no problems at all.
My recommendation: until the apt-get is serving a (useful) current version, might I suggest that the precompiled binary option be put on the doc page under Debian as either a first suggestion, or a secondary alternative to, the apt-get method.
I’m suggesting that instead of targeting the Debian section in the documentation specifically, we add a short text under the “Packages” heading, saying something like “Please note that if at any point the package you’re trying to use is outdated, you always have the option to use an official precompiled binary from the restic project. These are up to date binaries, built in a reproducible and verifiable way, that you can just download and run without having to do additional installation work”. Then probably a link to the “Pre-compiled Binary” section below.
That way we make the point for all packages and we also don’t point out any specific package as being a badly maintained one.
@Malp12 I wonder though, you wrote that you used “pip” to install restic? I think this is a Python package management program, what has that to do with restic?
Thank you @rawtaz for the documentation update. This helped me install the latest stable version of restic.
However, I had two issues where the documentation might have helped:
I wasn’t sure in which directory on my linux system I should put the binary in order to have it installed properly. This should be common linux knowledge (which I lack), but maybe it would help to link to a resource somewhere else?
The name of the binary is restic_0.9.2_linux_amd64 (depending on which OS you download for). I couldn’t call the program by calling just restic, but by calling the full name restic_0.9.2_linux_amd64 instead.
I succeeded after some trial and error.
What do you think? Do you think it is helpful to add this information to the installation manual? I would be happy to try updating the manual.
Thanks for the offer to improve the docs! The information you mention is basic knowledge, so it’s at the edge of what we can provide in the manual (we have to start somewhere…). I don’t mean to disrespect you learning Linux, that’s very admirable, but for most users it will be very clear where to put the binary (e.g. /usr/local/bin) and how to name it (restic).
In this particular case I think it does not hurt to add a sentence or two. If you want to do that, please go ahead! You can find the documentation in the file doc/020_installation.rst in the restic repository.
