Snapshots

Browse the snapshots of the repository

restic -r /path/to/repo snapshots

This will list all the snapshots in the repository, along with their IDs, timestamps, and paths.

Mount a snapshot

You can mount a snapshot as a read-only file system to browse its contents without restoring it.

Create a mount point directory where you want to mount the snapshot:

mkdir /path/to/mountpoint

Then, use the following command to mount the snapshot:

restic -r /path/to/repo mount /path/to/mountpoint --snapshot <snapshot-id>

You can then browse the contents of the snapshot in the mount point directory. To unmount the snapshot, do a control-C in the terminal where you mounted the snapshot or use the fusermount command:

fusermount -u /path/to/mountpoint

Restore files from a snapshot

To restore files from a snapshot, you can use the restore command. Specify the snapshot ID and the target directory where you want to restore the files:

restic -r /path/to/repo restore <snapshot-id> --target /path/to/restore

This will restore the files from the specified snapshot to the target directory. If you want to restore files to their original location, you can omit the --target option:

restic -r /path/to/repo restore <snapshot-id>

Remove old snapshots

To remove old snapshots, you can use the forget command. This command allows you to specify which snapshots to keep based on various criteria, such as age or number of snapshots to keep.

restic -r /path/to/repo forget --keep-last 5 --prune

This command will keep the last 5 snapshots and prune the repository to remove any data that is no longer referenced by any snapshot.

You can also use other options like --keep-daily, --keep-weekly, and --keep-monthly to specify how many snapshots to keep based on their age.

Check the integrity of the repository

To check the integrity of the repository, you can use the check command. This command verifies that all data in the repository is intact and can be restored.

restic -r /path/to/repo check

This will check the integrity of the repository and report any issues found. If there are any problems, you may need to run the rebuild-index command to fix them.

Forget policies

Restic supports forget policies, which allow you to define rules for how long to keep snapshots based on their age or other criteria. This helps manage the size of the repository and ensures that old backups are removed automatically. You can define forget policies in a configuration file or use command-line options when running the forget command. For example, you can create a file named forget-policy.txt with the following content:

--keep-last 5
--keep-daily 7
--keep-weekly 4
--keep-monthly 3
--prune

Then, you can run the forget command with the --policy option:

restic -r /path/to/repo forget --policy forget-policy.txt

This will apply the forget policy defined in the file to the repository, keeping the specified number of snapshots based on their age and pruning the repository accordingly.