I noticed that on one of my older (luckily not very important) backups has nothing in the snapshots folder and no snapshots are listed when restic snapshot is run on it. Should I write it off as lost data and just remove it?
Do you need it? If not, might not want to spend more time on it.
Do you think there should be snapshots there? If so, might want to investigate.
I haven’t ever heard of restic “accidentally” deleting snapshots, so I’m not sure what might have caused this. Do you know for sure that the repo had snapshots in it at some point?
If this situation is unexpected, you should elaborate on details.
I’m not sure it ever had snapshots there - it has about 500GB of data (mostly just game data), and it was something I ran in the background like a year+ ago, so I’m assuming that the backup might’ve just been interrupted before the snapshot was actually created.
That might be the case.
If you don’t actually think this is important and don’t know whether or not there’s actually anything to look for, I don’t think there’s much point investigating, considering I’ve never heard this type of symptom before.
You may be right that if there’s data in the repository but no snapshots, it might be due to an interrupted backup run that never created any snapshots. Or there were snapshots but they were forgotten using restic forget.
You could try the recover command, which might dig up something. But just like @rawtaz I’m not aware of someone complaining about disappearing snapshots (well, I remember some complaints about problems with repositories after filesystem damages, but I’m not aware that these affected snapshots).