Repository not clean after initial backup

1

Hi,

I’m using restic 0.7.3 and just created a new local repository. Afterwards I backed up just some subfolder of the disk I wanted to create the backup of:
restic -r /mnt/disk2/backup/ backup /mnt/disk1/folder1
This was about 160GB, afterwards I backed up the full disk with some excludes
restic -r /mnt/disk2/backup/ backup /mnt/disk1/ --exclude /mnt/disk1/folder2/ --exclude /mnt/disk1/folder3/
The repository is now about 360GB.
Then I deleted the older snapshot with only the single folder to clean this up a bit.
I ran restic check and restic prune on this and both are somehow complaining:

$ restic -r /mnt/disk2/backup/ check
enter password for repository: 
Create exclusive lock for repository
Load indexes
pack 3813e130 contained in several indexes: {e2535d14 f0f82fc6}
pack b4aeda7c contained in several indexes: {46d6d771 f0f82fc6}
pack 85372216 contained in several indexes: {2b9e53ae f0f82fc6}
pack 718e2bbe contained in several indexes: {b3438080 cf4b4b8e}
pack 0fa6fd5b contained in several indexes: {43b2dd73 cf4b4b8e}
pack 8ea6fbd0 contained in several indexes: {b337c26b bf1ac38e}
pack 76f66a59 contained in several indexes: {be54ffe0 f0f82fc6}
run restic 'rebuild-index' to correct this
Check all packs
Check snapshots, trees and blobs
$ restic -r /mnt/disk2/backup/ prune
enter password for repository: 
counting files in repo
building new index for repo
[10:19] 100.00%  74065 / 74065 packs
repository contains 74065 packs (456931 blobs) with 357.935 GiB bytes
processed 456931 blobs: 0 duplicate blobs, 0B duplicate
load all snapshots
find data that is still in use for 1 snapshots
[0:15] 100.00%  1 / 1 snapshots
found 442915 of 456931 data blobs still in use, removing 14016 blobs
will remove 0 invalid files
will delete 0 packs and rewrite 3120 packs, this frees 116.879 MiB
[18:13] 100.00%  3120 / 3120 packs rewritten
counting files in repo
[9:18] 100.00%  74029 / 74029 packs
finding old index files
saved new index as 6a61a895
remove 80 old index files
[0:02] 100.00%  3120 / 3120 packs deleted
done

Where does this come from, after only so few operations? Especially, what are the 116MB of data which are being deleted? I didn’t delete anything between the runs, and it doesn’t say this is duplicate data.

2

Welcome to the forum!

I’m not sure what the cause for the messages pack 718e2bbe contained in several indexes, is but we’re currently rewriting that part of restic (and it’s not a problem anyway).

From what I can see is the ~116MiB of data is probably metadata from the first snapshot. Does your filesystem have atime enabled?

3

Thanks for your fast answer!

I just checked, and disk1 (where the data is coming from) is mounted with noatime.
Is maybe the metadata somehow changing because the base folder of the backups was not the same? Restic didn’t use the first snapshot as parent for that reason.
Otherwise nothing should have changed between the two snapshots.

4

Hm, the way restic stores metadata, it’ll be the same whenever nothing in a directory (or subdirs) has changed (data or metadata), but it’ll record when the atime has changed. But since you use noatime, that shouldn’t be the case.

Is it possible that something small changed between the backups? A few files added/removed?

5

I actually added a single 76kB-file to /mnt/disk1/folder1 between the snapshots.
I’m quite certain nothing else changed.