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restic

restic

my favorite backup tool on linux, you can back up your stuff encrypted to various endpoints like amazon s3, backblaze b2, sftp and others. using rclone even to tons more. I’m not listing any more of them here since it’s under active development, check the docs out

list snapshots

list all the snapshots available in a given repo:

restic -r restic-repo-name snapshots

restore from a snapshot / backup

the most important thing you’re probably not doing:

  1. get the snapshot ID from the above output
restic -r restic-repo-name restore asdf1234 --target /tmp/restore

where asdf1234 is the exact snapshot name, if you want the latest snapshot you can just use latest instead of the ID

restore just a single file or folder:

this will restore /home/jonas from the snapshot to /tmp/restore

restic -r restic-repo-name restore asdf1234 --target /tmp/restore --include /home/jonas/

mount a snapshot

for the lazy guys, you can just mount a snapshot to restore files and folders and go through them:

restic -r restic-repo-name mount /mnt/restic

unlock a locked repository

if you get this, because a backup failed or you hit some api limits with b2:

Fatal: unable to create lock in backend: repository is already locked exclusively by PID

do this to unlock the repository (be sure that no process is running, check the mentioned PID in the message):

restic unlock -r b2:repo-name

that’s an example for b2 with the repo name repo-name

renameresticprofile