Restic prune takes many days with rclone + box

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I have an approx 1 TB backup set on box.com. This is really a great feature of restic in many ways.

I notice that accessing by ‘restic mount’, ‘restic snapshots’ or ‘restic clean’ takes a modest amount of time but ‘restic prune’ takes many days (it was 3+ and counting but the tropical storm took out my connection so back to the beginning).

Anyway, is this expected?

I did see the GDrive question earlier but I think that something different is going on here.

Is there some tuning to make this faster for the rclone case. Any thoughts?

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There are severe speed issues in current restic releases and some big improvements under development, see

Either try these proposed changes (with care!) or please be a bit patient.
The maintainers do a great job here and I agree that especially with pruning enhancements quality goes over development speed.

1 Like
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Wow. Thanks for all your hard work and contributions!

I happy to wait; the backup itself checks fine, and I only wanted to clean up some unreferenced packs. It’s nice to see that this issue is being addressed.

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Another approach you might consider:

Many of us use restic to backup to a local repository, which we then synchronize into cloud storage. (using rclone, ‘aws s3 sync’, etc.)

This provides several benefits:

  1. You have a local copy of your repo, for fast backups, restores and much faster prunes.
  2. Very efficient writes into the cloud.
  3. May allow you to move cloud data into high-latency/low-cost storage tiers (e.g. Glacier, GDA)
  4. Compliance with US_CERT 3-2-1 backup strategy

This approach has drawbacks as well, but is worthy of consideration.