Method 2 sounds like the best way to go, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that, I will give it a go, thank you! My use case is I can’t afford to spend money, and so I am limited to free hosting providers, which have limited storage capacity. This means I don’t want my remote backup to gradually grow in size over time because it’s keeping files that were deleted. Whereas locally I already have a big hard drive so I can let it contain multiple snapshots.
Thanks again, and for the great work on Restic!