I came across the following idea:
When backing up files, restic optionally adds a specific extended attribute (xattr) to files once they have been backed up. This xattr contains the date of when the backup was made. Additionally, this specific xattr is excluded when restic backs up extended attributes, so this specific xattr will never make its way to the actual backup. As an example, the xattr could be called “vnd.x.restic.last-backup”.
Use case: by looking at the specific xattr it is easy to determine when a specific file was last backed up or whether a file has been backed up at all.
Do you thing this would be of use? If you think this would be an useful feature, I’ll open a feature request on GitHub. I’d also be interested in working on a PR implementing this feature.