Restic backup from remote without keeping local copy

Getting Help
1

Hi,
I have an rsync.net remote server that has Restic binary on it and can create backups and store them locally.
I want to backup from my Google Drive to the rsync.net machine and store the backup there, but I don’t want to have to download the Google Drive to the server first as it will eat my quota twice. (Yes I can later delete the local copy but still not ideal).

Is that possible ?

Thanks

2

I guess you would have to mount the Google Drive on the rsync.net machine and then pull a backup. I’ve never used Google Drive so I’m not sure how that would be done but I duckduckgoed this. Maybe it helps?

3

I guess I could try rclone mount, however it is not clear to me how much local copies it’s keeping.
This text makes me think it’s just copying everything:

File systems expect things to be 100% reliable, whereas cloud storage systems are a long way from 100% reliable. The rclone sync/copy commands cope with this with lots of retries. However rclone mount can’t use retries in the same way without making local copies of the uploads. Look at the VFS File Caching for solutions to make mount more reliable.

4

For rclone mount used to read some remote cloud storage for restic backup I would use the following flags:

--vfs-cache-mode=full
--vfs-refresh
--vfs-cache-max-age 24h
--dir-cache-time 24h
--vfs-cache-max-size 100G

Adjust vfs-cache-max-size based on what you can afford.

I used these settings many times to backup various cloud systems.

In case of Google Drive pay attention that you can only read certain amount of data per day so for large datasets you might need to run it in stages.

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