Restic cache: how to reduce its size?

[durval]

Hello @fd0,

@fd0

You can remove the cache and restic will rebuild it on the fly, storing only data that is strictly needed, so it’ll be smaller than before. Over time, it’ll fill up again though, and only shrink when you remove data from the repo e.g. via forget / prune .

Right now the restic cache dir on the machine I run restic backup for those 65M files / 32TB datasets is reaching 600GB(!), so I need to do something soon.

I have two questions:

1. If I simply remove the cache dir, won’t that make the next restic backup increase greatly in time (in order to refill/rebuild the cache)?

2. After a prune, will the next restic backup automatically reduce the cache directory’s size ? Or do I need to also remove the cache directory (so restic backup rebuilds it smaller)?

Thanks in advance,
– Durval.