Restic – Backups Done Right

Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by Erlich_Bachman on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:50PM (#21412929)

Ok, that's certainly a good thing that it does support it now. Borg also allows to specify the name of that file, it does not restrict it to being "CACHEDIR.TAG". Giving an option to support both "CACHEDIR.TAG" and any other filename is a good thing. (One might want to exclude other directories that way, unrelated to cache directories.)

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by mike-cardwell on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:55PM (#21413016)

CACHEDIR.TAG seems to be based on a spec that multiple pieces of software are starting to use. Give it a quick google.

I can't think of any reason why you would need to customise the name of the file, but I'm sure there are use cases out there.

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by nine_k on Thursday October 31, 2019 @04:34PM (#21413443)

This is also a problem.

I might like to mark certain things as not backed up because they contain sensitive or otherwise unrelated information. But I might not want other tools treat them as cache data, that is, transient and safe to delete.

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by mike-cardwell on Monday November 04, 2019 @03:49AM (#21439912)

Then you can just add `--exclude filename` to your backup job.

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by kilburn on Thursday October 31, 2019 @07:18PM (#21414775)

Actually, "--exclude-caches" in restic is just an alias equivalent to the following [1]:

--exclude-if-present "CACHEDIR.TAG:Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55"

You can specify the tag filename, and optionally append ":initial content" (the tag file must start with this content to avoid false tagfile matches).

[1] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/040_backup.html#incl...

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by Erlich_Bachman on Friday November 01, 2019 @04:56AM (#21417144)

Like I wrote in the original comment, borg's additional functionality is that it supports both CACHEDIR.TAG and any other filename if that is what user wants.

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by kilburn on Friday November 01, 2019 @11:10AM (#21419632)

As I wrote in the previous comment, you can do that in restic with the "--exclude-if-present" option where you can specify whatever filename you want as well as optionally some content it must start with to avoid false positives.

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Re:Restic – Backups Done Right by Erlich_Bachman on Friday November 01, 2019 @01:15PM (#21421260)

Now I finally get it, thank you :). So Borg and Restic are basically on par considering that feature after all!

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