Hello everyone. I continue learning and using Restic.
Running restic 0.15.2 compiled with go1.20.3 on windows/amd64 on Windows.
I am making a daily backup of a folder of about 50 gigabytes. In this folder, in turn, an accounting program adds its own backup, and curiously, that daily backup weighs about 1 gigabyte.
In other words, for each day a 1 gig file is added which I assume has very little difference with the file from the previous day. I say this because it is an accounting program, so it only saves entries with numerical and alphanumeric information. They are not images or anything.
I don’t understand why an accounting program backs up so much information but it doesn’t depend on me so I leave it as is.
In the rest of the folder there are the usual things, documents, spreadsheets, images.
I am running restic with a command like:
restic -r rclone:backup:server --verbose backup --use-fs-snapshot --files-from "resticfilestobackup.txt" --password-file "resticpassword.txt"
That is, with standard compression (level auto) I suppose.
Running:
restic -r rclone:backup:server stats
repository c37257f6 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
scanning…
Stats in restore-size mode:
Snapshots processed: 23
Total File Count: 4038383
Total Size: 4.387 TiB
and running
restic -r rclone:backup:server stats --mode raw-data
repository c37257f6 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
scanning…
Stats in raw-data mode:
Snapshots processed: 23
Total Blob Count: 104666
Total Uncompressed Size: 74.170 GiB
Total Size: 31.104 GiB
Compression Progress: 100.00%
Compression Ratio: 2.38x
Compression Space Saving: 58.06%
1) If I interpret the reports correctly in the first one, it tells me that if I download and decompress the entire backup it would weigh about 4 TB.???
And in the second report it tells me that the backup in the repository weighs only about 31 gigabytes with a Compression Ratio: 2.38x
(The repo is on Google Drive by the way)
2) Could it be that since there are many 1 gigabyte files that have little difference between one and another, restic achieves those very high compression rates?