I’m going to start by saying this is not a problem with restic, it’s that I was using restic incorrectly, plus I wasn’t monitoring my backup script output or checking the backup repository. It’s really just a heads up for others.
I discovered today that backups for a couple of my servers haven’t run successfully for about two months. Around that time I likely upgraded to Restic 0.15, which I suspect parses the command line slightly differently from the previous versions of Restic.
Previously this command worked fine.
restic --repo s3:s3.amazonaws.com/s3-bucket-name --no-scan backup /var/www
With v0.15 when you run that you get the error ‘unknown command “/var/www” for “restic”’. When you put the “backup” command at the start of the line, or even just before the “–no-scan” it works fine.
restic backup --repo s3:s3.amazonaws.com/s3-bucket-name --no-scan /var/www
The docs say to do it the second way, so it’s a PEBKAC error, but I wonder if anyone else was caught out by this. Because it’s a CLI tool and I don’t monitor the output of the script, any failures are silent.
I do restore tests every six months, but I should probably do them more regularly - even though these personal servers aren’t critical.
I’m only suggesting this hypothesis because a) it’s likely and b) it totally could have happened to me 