Recommendations for testing full restore?

Getting Help
1

I’ve been using restic for a while under Linux to backup to Backblaze B2 and it’s been great. My scripts already do a check after every backup. I’ve done spot checks to see if files seem to be backed up, but I haven’t tested a full restore yet. Even though I trust restic and check, it seems like it would be a good idea to test a full restore.

Does anyone have any suggestions or scripts to test a full restore? Do you just restore to a temp directory and walk the directories you back up and do a diff of some sort? I do have enough room on my drive to do a full restore to a temp directory on that drive, but is there a way to test a restore without doing that?

Thanks.

2

If you don’t use Windows you can run restic mount, then compare your source data with the mounted data. I believe this is as close you can come to restore without actually restoring to disk.

The comparison can be done directly using a suitable diff tool, or indirectly by means of comparing lists of e.g. md5sum hashes.

3

Apart from mounting, there is another way to do a full restore without actually using up disk space.

You can export the snapshot (or a subdirectory of it) as a tar stream, and you can pipe that to tar and use tar to do the diff.