Hello dear restic community,
I am using restic to back up many of my projects. I am using classic cloud storage on OVH, and everything is working smoothly so far.
As I tend to have a lot of heavy files in my projects, my backups keep growing larger. The monthly bill is starting to become significant, so I’ve been looking for cheaper alternatives.
I started researching other storage solutions and found that OVH offers a “cloud-archive” option. Essentially, the price is five times lower compared to classic cloud storage, but the trade-off is that data is “frozen” and needs to be “unfrozen” before it becomes accessible. The unfreezing process can take several hours.
I don’t really mind waiting hours on the rare occasion I lose my computer or damage my hard drive, but it’s frustrating to wait for hours after every request to back up my data. Indeed, since restic needs to check my keys and consult all the metadata associated with my repository before uploading any changes, using this service requires first sending an unfreezing request, waiting several hours, and then performing the backup.
To address this issue, I was considering a hybrid solution: I could host the data/ directory in cold storage, while keeping the repository metadata in a hot cloud that is accessible within minutes. This would allow restic to quickly check and update the repository contents, and then upload the new chunks to the data/ folder in cold storage. Since the external repository files are relatively lightweight compared to the actual data, it achieves my primary goal of relocating my heavy files on a cheaper storage solution.
Here’s my question: Is it possible with restic to save the data/ directory in a different location from the rest of the repository? If so, how can I achieve this?
I’ve included the explanation of my problem to provide context around my main question. Please feel free to critique my approach or suggest better ideas 
Thank you for your help!