Really awesome work by everyone here, both the original poster with such a clear problem description and technical follow-ups - hugely appreciated, as well as everyone helping!
In the “Local” section for initializing a repository in the manual, we have a note about similar (external) issues, see Preparing a new repository — restic 0.16.3 documentation .
I imagine that we could add a similar warning for this specific issue, as it seems rather serious and not something restic can work around. Since it’s so general (affects not just a specific command) I was thinking the Installation section would make sense to put it in, but I think it’s something lost of people skip over. A better place is probably the same as I mentioned earlier, the “Preparing a new repository”, at the bottom of it and right above the “Local” heading: Preparing a new repository — restic 0.16.3 documentation . Let’s see what @fd0 thinks though.