Hi All,
I am used to manually do bluray backups and I was thinking to do the same with restic.
I wan to be able to split the repo/snapshots over many blurays. The best would be to still have access to the snapshots metadata from any disk or at least a listing of the snapshots saved in that disk.
Is this possible ?
Is there a way I could achieve this using low level commands ?
I am not that much aware about all the ins and outs of restic repo layout and your use case.
However I think you can select the files you want to burn in order to spread them on several bluerays. But I wouldn’t go that road because if one of the BR is broken you can kiss your backups goodbye.
Correct me if I am wrong but the repo should be seen as a whole entity and should not be split.
Restic is not designed for this use case and is unlikely to function correctly when pointed at an individual disc.
To restore anything, you’d either need to copy all the discs somewhere (meaning you need that much free space) or you need a way to simultaneously mount all the discs and union them (which is possible with an OverlayFS mount on Linux, if you have a Bluray drive for every disc.)
If you want to pursue using discs in this manner, you would probably be better with a standard incremental or differential backup solution.
Yes preferably but I could do without it, I would need to build an index or somehow include it in every BR.
The BRs would not be the primary backup location just an extra layer, it would be unlikely that I lose both the BR and the drives at the same time since they would be in different locations.
Fair enough,
Still having a backup of your backup is a clever thing don’t get me wrong. Couldn’t you (or your company) afford a cold storage some where such as glacier or anything like that? if not maybe you can use a large capacity hard drive or 2 and use them alternatively.
anyway if I understood correctly do not split your repo ;-).
It’s honestly just not a good fit for restic. If you have to recover anything, you won’t know which discs you need so you’d have to merge them all back together in order to pull any snapshots.
You also have to figure out what new files were created in the repo and burn only those.
At that point you’re halfway to inventing your own incremental backup system against the restic repo.