Rewrite source path on backup?

[dkebler]

I’d want to have a single dedicated machine for backup with all backups done by pulling. In other words no restic binary on the source machine, no cron jobs on source machine.

I guess I’m not the first to desire the kind of setup.

How to backup a server without running restic directly on it?

I think it’s unlikely that restic will support this as a first-class feature because, frankly, it’s out of scope. Speaking generically, a backup tool is given a source and a destination and it makes sure the source exists in the destination in some useful way. You might say that tar and cp fit this description and could be classified as backup tools. To that, I say: yes, I agree. They are (in a way) backup tools. Crude, perhaps, but workable. Gaining access to a remote system’s content is a di…

To avoid this path artifact I just need a way to access a remote source but afaik there is no equivalent sftp for source like there is for target.

So that’s not a problem if I use sshfs or (other method at involves a local mount) but then I end up with this path artifact (of the mount) in the repo snapshot which is not great as that is setup dependent would be confusing and could make restoring from another path problematic.

Note: There is already a way to rewrite/replace the hostname

-H, --host hostname set the hostname for the snapshot manually. To prevent an expensive rescan use the "parent" flag

That I would need to use in the remote mount case since the host will be the backup server not the host of the source (see my snapshot output).

So looks like -P isn’t taken and that could be used for this path rewrite
maybe like so?

-P /new/base/path#/path/to/match

so in my case -P /#/mnt/238/gate/

would rewrite all /mnt/238/gate/opt to /opt

Having this option doesn’t involve restic knowing where/how the source lives but does allow one (for whatever reasons) to keep a consistent base path in the repo no matter how it is backed up. So maybe that is within the scope of this project?