There are no dates/times, and it’s hard to tell where one backup finished and another started because the extra line break is not actually where that happens… Is there a special flag I need to use, or is this something that can be improved? I’d personally like to see some sort of regular output every so often (with a timestamp!) indicating progress, so I can better follow a backup in progress, etc.
You can add date to the output (before the restic command), as well as a couple of extra lines or similar, if you wish. I presume you’re collecting these logs from the restic output, and in that case it’s pretty much what it is. You probably don’t want restic to include newlines and stuff in the regular output, better to append that yourself.
Sounds good, although I’m using macOS’s LaunchAgents which, AFAIK, don’t parse bash like that – you simply give it a command and it runs it. So I’ll have to write a script.
The top-level answer to your question about the logging strategy is: There isn’t one (yet). At the moment, the output is tailored towards interactive shell usage, and that’s it. We’ll probably add more output modes as the program matures.