Snapshotting a directory from STDIN?

#1

I’m thinking about automating some application snapshotting, and it would be really convenient if I could create snapshots structured as a directory of files without writing copies of the content to disk first.

How complex would it be to make something like this work:

tar cvf - * | restic backup --stdin --tar

What I have in mind specifically is building a script that would run mysqldump on one table at a time and generate a tar stream looking like ${DATABASE}/${TABLE}.sql. This would make it really quick for me to restore individual tables from any snapshot, and with --stdin I wouldn’t have to worry about having enough disk space and IO available outside the restic repo to dump all databases to at the same time first.

This would also offer a really nice path for migrating existing tar backups to restic snapshots

Edit: Finally found a few past references to this idea:



#2

This is a good idea and has indeed been proposed several times already, here’s another one:

I think we need to decouple this from backup/restore and make two new commands: import and export, which imports from and exports to e.g. tar files.

The pieces are in place so far and @matt offered to do the export part, so it “just” needs to be done :stuck_out_tongue:

#3

Ah, just a Small Matter of Programming then! :slight_smile:

I take it the refactor previously mentioned as making it easier to implement has happened already?

#4

It has, but at the moment we have several big things to work on, so it’s not something I would start right now. So don’t get your hopes up that this will be added near-term :wink:

#5

Is this feature request tracked on GitHub?