Sticky & hidden snapshots

Features and Ideas
1

Hi,

I would like to suggest sticky & hidden snapshots.

If you guessed it right

Sticky : prevent accidental deletion of snapshots. So only delete normal snapshots

Hidden: hide snapshots in Normal output of restic snapshots

instead show not hidden snapshots (at the end)
Showing 50 / 300

restic sticky (snapshot Id)
restic hide (snapshot Id)
restic nonsticky (snapshot id)
restic unhide (snapshot id)
The above mentioned commands should do as it says

To view hidden / sticky snapshots specifically
restic snapshots sticky
restic snapshots hidden

Output of restic snapshots should only hide hidden snapshots sticky & normal should be viewed.

Commands prune & check should not be affected by this.

Thanks

2

Would you care to elaborate what usecase you have for hidden snapshots?
In regards to sticky snapshots one should make plenty of use of the --dry-run flag when working with forget.

3

when snapshots counts grow larger with a host / tag it’s a huge dump on screen.
So in other words restic snapshots would dump like only most recent snapshots on screen.

Incase of forgot snapshots there should be a warning message before deleting. with grep only that snapshot I’d in view.

4

Have you tried restic snapshots --last yet? This would output exactly what you are looking for; the last available snapshot for a given host.
The helptext for this is:
--last only show the last snapshot for each host and path

I think that’s exactly a usecase for the --dry-run flag when working with a forget policy.
Then you would get the output what restic would’ve done when running the forget policy without actually applying it. So I don’t think there is a need for more commands right now.

5

Using --tag with restic backup you could add a “volatile” tag to backups which you do not want to be sticky. You can also use restic tag to add/remove such a tag after the backup.

When running forget, have it only consider snapshots with the volatile tag via --tag volatile. Sticky snapshots!