Restic for multimedia files

Getting Help
1

Hello!

Currently I’m using restic to backup my laptop with 2TB SSD onto external HDD (RDX cartridge). It works great, but the problem is that my laptop’s drive is getting full (~30G of free space).

The main consumption goes to multimedia files:

  • all kinds of audio recordings
  • videos & images
  • audio/video recordings of Zoom meetings for our non-profit

Every week we have two online Zoom meetings which contribute with ~3hr of *.mp4 recording which I put on my Nitrokey Nextbox for private access to our members.

Now, I bought a Synology DS225+ NAS station equipped (not assembled yet) with 2x8TB disks in btrfs raid1 which should regularly backup our laptop + the Mini PC with 1TB disk which should arrive soon.

I’d like to transfer the above mentioned multimedia files (~800G + 600G of Zoom meetings) onto NAS, so I can free up currently occupied space on my laptop.

My question is whether to simply init new restic repo on the NAS, perform backup and move multimedia files from laptop’s drive since then those files can be accessed via NFS from both laptop and MiniPC? Or should I just cp them onto one portion of NAS (not handled by restic repo) and perform backup only for remaining laptop and Mini PC files?

In case of moving everything under single initial restic snapshot containing everything, I’d have to assure that this snapshot never gets removed. How to safely do it in order not to lose original multimedia collection?

Sincerely,

Gour

2

id split it.

move the cold multimedia (~800G + zoom pile) onto the nas as normal shared folders (nfs/smb), keep the nextbox copy for members if you want. that frees the laptop ssd without tying the media to a restic snapshot you can never forget.

then restic the laptop (and later the mini pc) to a repo on the nas over sftp/rest. schedule forget/prune like normal. you do NOT need a forever snapshot of the big media inside restic if the files live on the nas and you back that volume up with hyper backup or a second restic repo for the nas itself.

if you still want restic on the media too, init a separate repo just for that path and tag one snapshot keep / use a keep-tag policy so prune never eats it. but for mostly-static mp4s, plain copy + nas redundancy is usually less headache than one giant forever snapshot.

dont put the only copy of the zoom archive inside a restic pack on the same disks with no second backup. shrug