Snapshot parents

Getting Help
1

I have a pCloud drive mounted on several machines. I was playing with restic backup from 3 different machines on the same sub-directory from within pCloudDrive (and with no changes to the directory).

The 4 current snapshots are:

 $ restic -r rclone:Dropbox:test snapshots 
repository a34a7139 opened successfully, password is correct
ID        Time                 Host         Tags        Paths
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4e7f0681  2020-11-14 12:09:22  brain                    /home/craig/pCloudDrive/Documents/Important Pictures
1e92bc3a  2020-11-14 12:09:52  thanatos                 /home/craig/pCloudDrive/Documents/Important Pictures
3b2241f8  2020-11-14 12:42:49  raspberrypi              /home/pi/pCloudDrive/Documents/Important Pictures
fb5bd555  2020-11-15 07:51:53  raspberrypi              /home/pi/pCloudDrive/Documents/Important Pictures
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 snapshots

First question, is there a way to see the parent snapshot of a snapshot. For example, can I tell if there is a parent of 3b2241f8? (or which one it is?)

Second question, the parent to the above is either none or 1e92bc3a, depends if restic cares about the home directory part of the path… does it?

Due to de-duplication, as I remember, there was not a large space increase when doing 3b2241f8.

Thanks…

2

You can use restic cat snapshot <snapshot ID> and it will show the parent (if any).
AFAIK restic uses the hostname and the paths to find an appropriate parent. In your example I guess that only the last snapshot used a parent.

3

Note that the parent snapshot is purely metadata. The parent used by the backup process generally doesn’t actually impact the created snapshot, it can just make it faster to create by allowing restic to skip processing files whose metadata hasn’t changed. After a snapshot has been created, it is independent of its parent.

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