I’ve been trying for the better part of a week now to backup the 775-ish GB on my laptop to an SFTP server on the local network. I keep having to interrupt it, but I’d say it’s been running for a cumulative total of around 60 hours at this point, and my drive has over 500 GB (compressed, I assume) in the data folder, but I’ve still yet to complete a single snapshot.
I recently ran restic -r <repository> --use-fs-snapshot --verbose=2 backup C:\, and it’s been going for two hours straight, but it says its only copied 27 GiB (3.5%) with an ETA that’s slowly crept up to 800 hours. I think I’m seeing the exact same files rush by as I did the last time I backed it up, so I strongly suspect it’s just copying all the files again. The FAQ says this shouldn’t be the case when backups are interrupted unless this is the re-scanning the files on the disk it mentions although I can’t imagine that would take this long.
I’m running restic 0.18.0 compiled with go1.24.1 on windows/amd64.
Restic will just be rescanning files, not re-uploading them.
If it hasn’t created a single snapshot yet it doesn’t have anything prior to reference and so will be rescanning.
Sounds like you might have a network/performance issue if it’s taking that long, for me to backup a 900GG share over 1Gbp/s fibre connection (really limited to about 500Mb/s in the upload direction it was going) took me ~3 hours.
I’d definitely recommend you check for the usual windows gotcha of “the antivirus is slowing things down to a crawl” if you haven’t already: FAQ — restic 0.18.1 documentation
As you already saw in the FAQ, this should not happen. There’s a more technical explanation as to why not by fd0 here, which you might find interesting: Aborted Backups - #4 by fd0
From your description, it sounds like you’re seeing the files being scanned again, but without seeing the output of the restic command it’s not possible to say for certain.
