What are the benefits of updating repos to version 2?

Getting Help
1

The main one seems to be compression. Any other improvements?

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2

Just compression alone is usually enough to warrant an upgrade: for most data sets, the repository is significantly smaller if compressed. And as a bonus the cache size usually shrinks by a factor 2 to 4. When the upload bandwidth is the limiting factor, then the backup will complete faster. For cloud storages, the storage and traffic costs will also decrease in correspondence with the compression ratio.

Besides that the remaining tweaks to the repository format are also available in repository version 1 when using a recent enough restic version.

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3

Welcome to the forum!

Updating repos mean run the backup again from the start? With the new restic version?

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No, it means that new data added to the repository after the upgrade will be compressed. If you want to compress old data in the repository, check the —repack-uncompressed parameter of restic prune. And, remember that —max-repack-size is your friend.

You can check all the details in the documentation.

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5

@bazinga Thanks a lot.
I’ve been using restic since last year, I think Restic version 0.15.2.
Now I’m using 0.16.4 and if I run cat config I get:

"version": 2

So I guess I don’t need to do anything.

6

You’re fine. Compression was introduced in version 0.14. You can also run restic stats —mode raw-data to check the compression progress / coverage of your repository.

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7

Thanks again!

restic stats —mode raw-data

Stats in raw-data mode:
Snapshots processed: 141
Total Blob Count: 89522
Total Uncompressed Size: 29.155 GiB
Total Size: 27.595 GiB
Compression Progress: 100.00%
Compression Ratio: 1.06x
Compression Space Saving: 5.35%

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I have a 2.3 TB backup on backblaze b2 and it looks like compression is going to take about 40 hours to compress all the uncompressed at max. is that normal?
Also I have anothyer where I run the migrate command, it says it opened successfully but then just stops no errors.

9

maximum compression consumes a lot of CPU which slows down the compression process.

Please be a little more specific. What are the exact commands and output? Are you able to run any other command against that repository?

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Thank you for your help, I made a new topic as this was off topic.