First of all thank you so much for accepting me here and as well for so great tool like restic.
I just started using it (today, to be more specific), and as I consider backups a crucial thing, I am trying to understand how things works.
I am coming from some years using rsync, and would love to learn more about restic.
Well, I use Linux (EndeavourOS), installed restic, created my first backup, ran consistency checks, etc.
I just mounted a drive using restic -r /path/to/my/repo mount /mount/point and don’t understood very well how does somethings works.
I mean, I backed up 160 GB of data, more or less, and inside the new mount I have now around 1 TB of files and folders (currently I have only two snapshots created).
Inside this mount, there are a multitude of folders, like hosts, ids and snapshots. Well, I don’t understood this very well, and, of course, I am probably misunderstanding somethings and/or missing something.
let’s say you have 100GB dataset and only 1GB file is changing before you run restic snapshot (backup).
Forgetting compression your first snapshot will take 100GB repo size but second one only adds 1GB (only changed data). 99GB will be shared between two snapshots. Repo size will be 101GB
Then 1GB changes again and you take another restic snapshot - now your repo contains 102GB of data.
But when mounted it shows 3 snapshots - 100GB each, 300GB total. As this is how much space you would need when you would like to restore all of them.
This is only different way to show the same data. “Snapshots” show all snapshots. “Hosts” - snapshots for specific hosts you run restic backup etc.
You might want to check out https://restic.net/ - a lot of the concepts are explained there and it’s very useful. The hosts, ids and snapshots are just three different paths toward your data. You can backup different hosts and folders into one repo and then find them via these paths.
