Thanks restic for saving me time

Community
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This is a minor story of a home user restore that saved nothing more than time. The deleted file could have been recreated.

I almost didn’t post, but even though my restic save is minor compared to many of the issues raised here, I still think it would be nice for the devs to hear from a happy user who was able to restore due after his own stupidity.

I’ve been using cloudberry for years to backup some critical files on my home Linux server to BackBlaze. That Linux server contains most critical data that matters. The Windows computer that’s shared with my wife has never been backed up other than scp-ing a few files to the Linux server.

I first heard of restic last fall and have set up a nightly backup to BackBlaze of mine and my wife’s My Documents/Desktops as well as a photo directory.

My son, who lives with us, attends community college, and delivers pizza shares a first name with me. I had completed but not filed my taxes. I was waiting to figure out if I had the money to max out IRA contributions as well as track down one final obscure bit of info I needed.

My son has used the tax software on that shared machine to file taxes the last few years. He asked to do so. I fired up the software, read in his last year return and clicked next. It asked to save. Sure. It asked if it was safe to overwrite. That’s odd. It must have auto saved as it read in the old file. Sure.

My son took over and completed his much simpler return.

After he left, the software was still up. I’d decided by then the IRA contribution was a go, so I may as well update that. I closed his return and went to open mine when I realized what had happened. The tax software defaults to a naming convention of FIRSTNAME LASTNAME YEAR.

I’d wiped out my return when it asked if I wanted to overwrite. Not the end of the world. It just meant I’d have to re-enter everything. Then I remembered I was doing nightly backups.

Less than five minutes later I had my return back. Most of that time was spent looking up the restore process and figuring out the restic native path for my Windows system.

Like I said. It’s a minor victory, but I’m still very grateful.

Thank you all for the effort you’ve put into creating such a great product!

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Thank you very much for posting this story! It’s very motivating to hear that restic helps people in practice, otherwise what we mostly hear about is bugs, feature requests and requests for help (when restic isn’t as well documented as it could be).

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That’s the sad thing about forums.
I mean, if you go to a forum about teeth surgeries you will most likely only read about pain, complications, pus and inflammations. Because those who didn’t have problems usualy don’t post but carry on with their lives.

However, believe me your programm was a life change for me. Since two years I have all my servers now backed up and sleeping much more better. All restores I needed by now went fine. Gladly I was not hosted at ovh, but if I was I would be safe now and online again quite fast thanks to your Software.

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Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:

I must say the forum here turned out to be a very pleasant place to hang out, even so that people like @cdhowie stick around and help other users just for the sake of it. The forum is also pretty low maintenance, mainly because Discourse (the software) is great!

I’ve talked about this for a bit on the ChangeLog podcast I was invited to recently, we tried a few tricks to get positive feedback. For example, the GitHub issue template includes a few questions, and the last one is:


Did restic help you today? Did it make you happy in any way?
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I think this helps tremendously. Reading a bug report about how restic behaves badly, followed by e.g. a description how restic has already saved the bug reporter several times takes a bit of the negativity away.

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I appreciate the kind words @fd0. I also echo the OP. We use restic for our production server backups and have never had an issue restoring from them. We have to pull from them maybe once a month, usually due to human error on an in-development website. Restic gives me the ability to confidently tell our developers that I can restore any site to any of a few weeks’ worth of nightly backups.

Restic’s deduplication is fantastic as well. Many of these sites have dozens of GBs of media, and not having to mess around with incremental backups while still realizing similar reduction in backup size is really nice.

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