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:
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