Restoring from backup
Restoring from a snapshot
Restoring a snapshot is as easy as it sounds, just use the following
command to restore the contents of the latest snapshot to
/tmp/restore-work:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo restore 79766175 --target /tmp/restore-work
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/user/work] at 2015-05-08 21:40:19.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-work
Use the word latest to restore the last backup. You can also combine
latest with the --host and --path filters to choose the last
backup for a specific host, path or both.
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo restore latest --target /tmp/restore-art --path "/home/art" --host luigi
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/art] at 2015-05-08 21:45:17.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-art
Use --exclude and --include to restrict the restore to a subset of
files in the snapshot. For example, to restore a single file:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo restore 79766175 --target /tmp/restore-work --include /work/foo
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/user/work] at 2015-05-08 21:40:19.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-work
This will restore the file foo to /tmp/restore-work/work/foo.
To only restore a specific subfolder, you can use the <snapshot>:<subfolder>
syntax, where snapshot is the ID of a snapshot (or the string latest)
and subfolder is a path within the snapshot.
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo restore 79766175:/work --target /tmp/restore-work --include /foo
enter password for repository:
restoring <Snapshot of [/home/user/work] at 2015-05-08 21:40:19.884408621 +0200 CEST> to /tmp/restore-work
This will restore the file foo to /tmp/restore-work/foo.
You can use the command restic ls latest or restic find foo to find the
path to the file within the snapshot. This path you can then pass to
--include in verbatim to only restore the single file or directory.
There are case insensitive variants of --exclude and --include called
--iexclude and --iinclude. These options will behave the same way but
ignore the casing of paths.
Restoring symbolic links on windows is only possible when the user has
SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege privilege or is running as admin. This is a
restriction of windows not restic.
By default, restic does not restore files as sparse. Use restore --sparse to
enable the creation of sparse files if supported by the filesystem. Then restic
will restore long runs of zero bytes as holes in the corresponding files.
Reading from a hole returns the original zero bytes, but it does not consume
disk space. Note that the exact location of the holes can differ from those in
the original file, as their location is determined while restoring and is not
stored explicitly.
Restore using mount
Browsing your backup as a regular file system is also very easy. First,
create a mount point such as /mnt/restic and then use the following
command to serve the repository with FUSE:
$ mkdir /mnt/restic
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo mount /mnt/restic
enter password for repository:
Now serving /srv/restic-repo at /mnt/restic
Use another terminal or tool to browse the contents of this folder.
When finished, quit with Ctrl-c here or umount the mountpoint.
Mounting repositories via FUSE is only possible on Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.
On Linux, the fuse kernel module needs to be loaded and the fusermount
command needs to be in the PATH. On macOS, you need FUSE for macOS. On FreeBSD, you may need to install FUSE
and load the kernel module (kldload fuse).
Restic supports storage and preservation of hard links. However, since
hard links exist in the scope of a filesystem by definition, restoring
hard links from a fuse mount should be done by a program that preserves
hard links. A program that does so is rsync, used with the option
--hard-links.
Note
restic mount is mostly useful if you want to restore just a few
files out of a snapshot, or to check which files are contained in a snapshot.
To restore many files or a whole snapshot, restic restore is the best
alternative, often it is significantly faster.
Printing files to stdout
Sometimes it’s helpful to print files to stdout so that other programs can read the data directly. This can be achieved by using the dump command, like this:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump latest production.sql | mysql
If you have saved multiple different things into the same repo, the latest
snapshot may not be the right one. For example, consider the following
snapshots in a repository:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo snapshots
ID Date Host Tags Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
562bfc5e 2018-07-14 20:18:01 mopped /home/user/file1
bbacb625 2018-07-14 20:18:07 mopped /home/other/work
e922c858 2018-07-14 20:18:10 mopped /home/other/work
098db9d5 2018-07-14 20:18:13 mopped /production.sql
b62f46ec 2018-07-14 20:18:16 mopped /home/user/file1
1541acae 2018-07-14 20:18:18 mopped /home/other/work
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here, restic would resolve latest to the snapshot 1541acae, which does
not contain the file we’d like to print at all (production.sql). In this
case, you can pass restic the snapshot ID of the snapshot you like to restore:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump 098db9d5 production.sql | mysql
Or you can pass restic a path that should be used for selecting the latest snapshot. The path must match the patch printed in the “Directory” column, e.g.:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump --path /production.sql latest production.sql | mysql
It is also possible to dump the contents of a whole folder structure to
stdout. To retain the information about the files and folders Restic will
output the contents in the tar (default) or zip format:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump latest /home/other/work > restore.tar
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump -a zip latest /home/other/work > restore.zip
The folder content is then contained at /home/other/work within the archive.
To include the folder content at the root of the archive, you can use the <snapshot>:<subfolder> syntax:
$ restic -r /srv/restic-repo dump latest:/home/other/work / > restore.tar