Backing up

Now we’re ready to backup some data. The contents of a directory at a specific point in time is called a “snapshot” in restic. Run the following command and enter the repository password you chose above again:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo --verbose backup ~/work
open repository
enter password for repository:
password is correct
lock repository
load index files
start scan
start backup
scan finished in 1.837s
processed 1.720 GiB in 0:12
Files:        5307 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:         1867 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Added:      1.700 GiB
snapshot 40dc1520 saved

As you can see, restic created a backup of the directory and was pretty fast! The specific snapshot just created is identified by a sequence of hexadecimal characters, 40dc1520 in this case.

If you don’t pass the --verbose option, restic will print less data (but you’ll still get a nice live status display).

If you run the command again, restic will create another snapshot of your data, but this time it’s even faster. This is de-duplication at work!

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --verbose ~/work
open repository
enter password for repository:
password is correct
lock repository
load index files
using parent snapshot d875ae93
start scan
start backup
scan finished in 1.881s
processed 1.720 GiB in 0:03
Files:           0 new,     0 changed,  5307 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,     0 changed,  1867 unmodified
Added:      0 B
snapshot 79766175 saved

You can even backup individual files in the same repository (not passing --verbose means less output):

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup ~/work.txt
enter password for repository:
password is correct
snapshot 249d0210 saved

If you’re interested in what restic does, pass --verbose twice (or --verbose 2) to display detailed information about each file and directory restic encounters:

$ echo 'more data foo bar' >> ~/work.txt

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --verbose --verbose ~/work.txt
open repository
enter password for repository:
password is correct
lock repository
load index files
using parent snapshot f3f8d56b
start scan
start backup
scan finished in 2.115s
modified  /home/user/work.txt, saved in 0.007s (22 B added)
modified  /home/user/, saved in 0.008s (0 B added, 378 B metadata)
modified  /home/, saved in 0.009s (0 B added, 375 B metadata)
processed 22 B in 0:02
Files:           0 new,     1 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,     2 changed,     0 unmodified
Data Blobs:      1 new
Tree Blobs:      3 new
Added:      1.116 KiB
snapshot 8dc503fc saved

In fact several hosts may use the same repository to backup directories and files leading to a greater de-duplication.

Please be aware that when you backup different directories (or the directories to be saved have a variable name component like a time/date), restic always needs to read all files and only afterwards can compute which parts of the files need to be saved. When you backup the same directory again (maybe with new or changed files) restic will find the old snapshot in the repo and by default only reads those files that are new or have been modified since the last snapshot. This is decided based on the modify date of the file in the file system.

Now is a good time to run restic check to verify that all data is properly stored in the repository. You should run this command regularly to make sure the internal structure of the repository is free of errors.

Including and Excluding Files

You can exclude folders and files by specifying exclude patterns, currently the exclude options are:

  • --exclude Specified one or more times to exclude one or more items
  • --exclude-caches Specified once to exclude folders containing a special file
  • --exclude-file Specified one or more times to exclude items listed in a given file
  • --exclude-if-present Specified one or more times to exclude a folders content if it contains a given file (optionally having a given header)
Let’s say we have a file called excludes.txt with the following content:
# exclude go-files
*.go
# exclude foo/x/y/z/bar foo/x/bar foo/bar
foo/**/bar

It can be used like this:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup ~/work --exclude="*.c" --exclude-file=excludes.txt

This instruct restic to exclude files matching the following criteria:

  • All files matching *.go (second line in excludes.txt)
  • All files and sub-directories named bar which reside somewhere below a directory called foo (fourth line in excludes.txt)
  • All files matching *.c (parameter --exclude)

Please see restic help backup for more specific information about each exclude option.

Patterns use filepath.Glob internally, see filepath.Match for syntax. Patterns are tested against the full path of a file/dir to be saved, even if restic is passed a relative path to save. Environment-variables in exclude-files are expanded with os.ExpandEnv.

Patterns need to match on complete path components. For example, the pattern foo:

  • matches /dir1/foo/dir2/file and /dir/foo
  • does not match /dir/foobar or barfoo

A trailing / is ignored, a leading / anchors the pattern at the root directory. This means, /bin matches /bin/bash but does not match /usr/bin/restic.

Regular wildcards cannot be used to match over the directory separator /. For example: b*ash matches /bin/bash but does not match /bin/ash.

For this, the special wildcard ** can be used to match arbitrary sub-directories: The pattern foo/**/bar matches:

  • /dir1/foo/dir2/bar/file
  • /foo/bar/file
  • /tmp/foo/bar

By specifying the option --one-file-system you can instruct restic to only backup files from the file systems the initially specified files or directories reside on. For example, calling restic like this won’t backup /sys or /dev on a Linux system:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --one-file-system /

By using the --files-from option you can read the files you want to backup from a file. This is especially useful if a lot of files have to be backed up that are not in the same folder or are maybe pre-filtered by other software.

For example maybe you want to backup files which have a name that matches a certain pattern:

$ find /tmp/somefiles | grep 'PATTERN' > /tmp/files_to_backup

You can then use restic to backup the filtered files:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --files-from /tmp/files_to_backup

Incidentally you can also combine --files-from with the normal files args:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --files-from /tmp/files_to_backup /tmp/some_additional_file

Paths in the listing file can be absolute or relative.

Comparing Snapshots

Restic has a diff command which shows the difference between two snapshots and displays a small statistic, just pass the command two snapshot IDs:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo diff 5845b002 2ab627a6
password is correct
comparing snapshot ea657ce5 to 2ab627a6:

 C   /restic/cmd_diff.go
+    /restic/foo
 C   /restic/restic

Files:           0 new,     0 removed,     2 changed
Dirs:            1 new,     0 removed
Others:          0 new,     0 removed
Data Blobs:     14 new,    15 removed
Tree Blobs:      2 new,     1 removed
  Added:   16.403 MiB
  Removed: 16.402 MiB

Backing up special items and metadata

Symlinks are archived as symlinks, restic does not follow them. When you restore, you get the same symlink again, with the same link target and the same timestamps.

If there is a bind-mount below a directory that is to be saved, restic descends into it.

Device files are saved and restored as device files. This means that e.g. /dev/sda is archived as a block device file and restored as such. This also means that the content of the corresponding disk is not read, at least not from the device file.

By default, restic does not save the access time (atime) for any files or other items, since it is not possible to reliably disable updating the access time by restic itself. This means that for each new backup a lot of metadata is written, and the next backup needs to write new metadata again. If you really want to save the access time for files and directories, you can pass the --with-atime option to the backup command.

Reading data from stdin

Sometimes it can be nice to directly save the output of a program, e.g. mysqldump so that the SQL can later be restored. Restic supports this mode of operation, just supply the option --stdin to the backup command like this:

$ mysqldump [...] | restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --stdin

This creates a new snapshot of the output of mysqldump. You can then use e.g. the fuse mounting option (see below) to mount the repository and read the file.

By default, the file name stdin is used, a different name can be specified with --stdin-filename, e.g. like this:

$ mysqldump [...] | restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --stdin --stdin-filename production.sql

Tags for backup

Snapshots can have one or more tags, short strings which add identifying information. Just specify the tags for a snapshot one by one with --tag:

$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo backup --tag projectX --tag foo --tag bar ~/work
[...]

The tags can later be used to keep (or forget) snapshots with the forget command. The command tag can be used to modify tags on an existing snapshot.