Understanding restic output

Getting Help
1

I’m trying to figure out what does this means.

Restic has just finished making a backup that took 5 days. Then moments later I re-ran the command and I got this:

scan finished in 63.848s: 26376 files, 3.638 TiB

Files:           0 new,   105 changed, 26271 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,   107 changed,   838 unmodified
Data Blobs:      3 new
Tree Blobs:    108 new
Added to the repo: 10.657 MiB

processed 26376 files, 3.638 TiB in 1:24

So, I said, well that is super weird because the drive I’m backing up hasn’t been used at all so no files (except for just 1 that gets updated daily) must have changed but I got more than 100 files and dirs reported as changed so I went to run a diff between the two snapshots and it output:

Files:           0 new,     0 removed,     1 changed
Dirs:            0 new,     0 removed
Others:          0 new,     0 removed
Data Blobs:      3 new,     3 removed
Tree Blobs:    108 new,   108 removed
  Added:   10.657 MiB
  Removed: 10.657 MiB

So why did I got those 105 files and 107 dirs reported as changed when in fact only 1 file changed?

2

Because probably some metadata changed like adate or mdate, then the file will be scanned for actual changes and changed parts will get reuploaded.

1 Like
3

thank you, I was thinking about that too but wasn’t sure. Now that you mentioned it I ran the command with --metadata and yes, some files dates changed.