Nice, I’m looking forward to your feedback if it works now! I’ll have a look why restic (or the library we’re using to implement the CLI) behaves so strangely.
It works perfectly!!! Even my original.
As a lame excuse, I will say that I did not realize that the hyphens were being changed other than “–” to long dash, which I had fixed.
All that said, my sincerest apologies and thanks for all the help!!
@rawtaz: old habits die hard. I have been using Word since Version 1.1 in December 1985. Even my Font is Courier 10.
I will do a deep dive into Word settings to get rid of all the Autocorrect stuff that does things with hyphens.
It’s a bug in restic, the error message is misleading. I’ll correct that. Thanks for the report 
Silly things like this are always good to learn from, no need to apologize 
I mean, who has NOT had this happen one time or another!
That’s worthy some respect after all 
The error message will be improved in #1534 (including the bad hyphen):
$ ./restic restore latest –-target /tmp
more than one snapshot ID specified: [latest –-target /tmp]
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One thing I have noticed about restic is. It’s very cool, seems to be very powerful. But the documentation and command logic are severly lacking. I get a very “windows” like feeling from all this. i.e. When I was trying to speed up a restore because it was taking forever. I first tested it with the Restic Browser option, which worked well but extremely slow. So, I thought I would try it from cli to see if that would speed things up and at first it did not work but after, following some hints found on here, it worked, but still very slow.
restic restore 8fe51a62 -r /archive/allbackups/ snapshots --target /archive/restore/ FAILED
restic -r /archive/allbackups/ restore latest --target /archive/restore/ WORKED
The only thing different was where the “restore” option was placed.
This is expected. The first command you showed is incorrect syntax, I’m not sure why you think that you can write it that way. There’s nothing in restic help restore or the restore documentation suggesting you write the command that way.
If you follow the documentation/help, it will work. I recommend using restic help to see the proper syntax
I wrote it that way because other functions (like backup and snapshot) work that way. I did download and run the latest 0.16 (versus the 0.9 that is currently in the ubuntu repos). HUGE difference in speed, like now this is usable!
There’s some small differences in the arguments between the commands, always a good idea to refer to restic help <command> before using
Very good news! Yeah, the stable package repositories for some Linux distributions lack behind quite a lot, for natural reasons. This is when it’s so nice that restic is just a single binary 
I loved that part about it being a single binary as I have many boxes I would like to add this too. The speed thing was huge for me as I have a client in Syracuse (I’m in Buffalo) that I backup his windows 7 (vm) bloat every night (it’s like 202GB) Anyway, it was taking HOURS and I even had rsync doing an entire copy (-W option) as I found that doing it’s algorithm was actually taking longer that doing a straight up copy. Now, with this, I just do an intial copy and the subsequent copies are like an rsnapshot where it does hard links to data already there (I’m assuming that restic does this by default).
It certainly has been a learning curve but there are so many to choose from you can become jaded as to where your spending your time, etc…
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