Understanding Expansion, Paths and Pruning

Getting Help
1

I have restic running but I wanted to understand my situation a little better. I have the following command for my backups:

restic backup /path1 /path2/backup.*

Path 2 has log files, so I end up with one snapshot having:

/path1
/path2/backup.sh
/path2/backup.log

Then for the next snapshot it has:

/path1
/path2/backup.sh
/path2/backup.log
/path2/backup.log.1.gz

Does this mean that the forget command is going to group those two snapshots as separate when it looks for things to prune?

2

Yes, those are fully separate. Path is one of the criteria’s which have to match.

It might be better to backup the parent folder, rather than individual files. And use exclude/include patterns to select files that should be backupped.

3

Note that you can change the default behavior by using the --group-by option to the forget command. That way you can make restic not consider paths when it groups snapshots before forgetting. You can also use the --dry-run option to test these things.

4

Ok, this sounds like the best approach to me.

Thanks