Changelog for restic 0.15.1 (2023-01-30)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.15.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #3750: Remove b2_download_file_by_name: 404 warning from B2 backend
Fix #4147: Make prune --quiet not print progress bar
Fix #4163: Make self-update --output work with new filename on Windows
Fix #4167: Add missing ETA in backup progress bar
Enh #4143: Ignore empty lock files

Details

Bugfix #3750: Remove b2_download_file_by_name: 404 warning from B2 backend

In some cases the B2 backend could print b2_download_file_by_name: 404: : b2.b2err warnings. These are only debug messages and can be safely ignored.

Restic now uses an updated library for accessing B2, which removes the warning.

restic#3750 restic#4144 restic#4146
Bugfix #4147: Make prune --quiet not print progress bar

A regression in restic 0.15.0 caused prune --quiet to show a progress bar while deciding how to process each pack files. This has now been fixed.

restic#4147 restic#4153
Bugfix #4163: Make self-update --output work with new filename on Windows

Since restic 0.14.0 the self-update command did not work when a custom output filename was specified via the --output option. This has now been fixed.

As a workaround, either use an older restic version to run the self-update or create an empty file with the output filename before updating e.g. using CMD:

type nul > new-file.exe restic self-update --output new-file.exe

restic#4163 https://forum.restic.net/t/self-update-windows-started-failing-after-release-of-0-15/5836
Bugfix #4167: Add missing ETA in backup progress bar

A regression in restic 0.15.0 caused the ETA to be missing from the progress bar displayed by the backup command. This has now been fixed.

restic#4167
Enhancement #4143: Ignore empty lock files

With restic 0.15.0 the checks for stale locks became much stricter than before. In particular, empty or unreadable locks were no longer silently ignored. This made restic to complain with Load(<lock/1234567812>, 0, 0) returned error, retrying after 552.330144ms: load(<lock/1234567812>): invalid data returned and fail in the end.

The error message is now clarified and the implementation changed to ignore empty lock files which are sometimes created as the result of a failed uploads on some backends.

Please note that unreadable lock files still have to cleaned up manually. To do so, you can run restic unlock --remove-all which removes all existing lock files. But first make sure that no other restic process is currently using the repository.

restic#4143 restic#4152

Changelog for restic 0.15.0 (2023-01-12)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.15.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #2015: Make mount return exit code 0 after receiving Ctrl-C / SIGINT
Fix #2578: Make restore replace existing symlinks
Fix #2591: Don't read password from stdin for backup --stdin
Fix #3161: Delete files on Backblaze B2 more reliably
Fix #3336: Make SFTP backend report no space left on device
Fix #3567: Improve handling of interrupted syscalls in mount command
Fix #3897: Fix stuck copy command when -o <backend>.connections=1
Fix #3918: Correct prune statistics for partially compressed repositories
Fix #3951: Make ls return exit code 1 if snapshot cannot be loaded
Fix #4003: Make backup no longer hang on Solaris when seeing a FIFO file
Fix #4016: Support ExFAT-formatted local backends on macOS Ventura
Fix #4085: Make init ignore "Access Denied" errors when creating S3 buckets
Fix #4100: Make self-update enabled by default only in release builds
Fix #4103: Don't generate negative UIDs and GIDs in tar files from dump
Chg #2724: Include full snapshot ID in JSON output of backup
Chg #3929: Make unlock display message only when locks were actually removed
Chg #4033: Don't print skipped snapshots by default in copy command
Chg #4041: Update dependencies and require Go 1.18 or newer
Enh #14: Implement rewrite command
Enh #79: Restore files with long runs of zeros as sparse files
Enh #1078: Support restoring symbolic links on Windows
Enh #1734: Inform about successful retries after errors
Enh #1866: Improve handling of directories with duplicate entries
Enh #2134: Support B2 API keys restricted to hiding but not deleting files
Enh #2152: Make init open only one connection for the SFTP backend
Enh #2533: Handle cache corruption on disk and in downloads
Enh #2715: Stricter repository lock handling
Enh #2750: Make backup file read concurrency configurable
Enh #3029: Add support for credential_process to S3 backend
Enh #3096: Make mount command support macOS using macFUSE 4.x
Enh #3124: Support JSON output for the init command
Enh #3899: Optimize prune memory usage
Enh #3905: Improve speed of parent snapshot detection in backup command
Enh #3915: Add compression statistics to the stats command
Enh #3925: Provide command completion for PowerShell
Enh #3931: Allow backup file tree scanner to be disabled
Enh #3932: Improve handling of ErrDot errors in rclone and sftp backends
Enh #3943: Ignore additional/unknown files in repository
Enh #3955: Improve backup performance for small files

Details

Bugfix #2015: Make mount return exit code 0 after receiving Ctrl-C / SIGINT

To stop the mount command, a user has to press Ctrl-C or send a SIGINT signal to restic. This used to cause restic to exit with a non-zero exit code.

The exit code has now been changed to zero as the above is the expected way to stop the mount command and should therefore be considered successful.

restic#2015 restic#3894
Bugfix #2578: Make restore replace existing symlinks

When restoring a symlink, restic used to report an error if the target path already existed. This has now been fixed such that the potentially existing target path is first removed before the symlink is restored.

restic#2578 restic#3780
Bugfix #2591: Don't read password from stdin for backup --stdin

The backup command when used with --stdin previously tried to read first the password, then the data to be backed up from standard input. This meant it would often confuse part of the data for the password.

From now on, it will instead exit with the message Fatal: cannot read both password and data from stdin unless the password is passed in some other way (such as --restic-password-file, RESTIC_PASSWORD, etc).

To enter the password interactively a password command has to be used. For example on Linux, mysqldump somedatabase | restic backup --stdin --password-command='sh -c "systemd-ask-password < /dev/tty"' securely reads the password from the terminal.

restic#2591 restic#4011
Bugfix #3161: Delete files on Backblaze B2 more reliably

Restic used to only delete the latest version of files stored in B2. In most cases this worked well as there was only a single version of the file. However, due to retries while uploading it is possible for multiple file versions to be stored at B2. This could lead to various problems for files that should have been deleted but still existed.

The implementation has now been changed to delete all versions of files, which doubles the amount of Class B transactions necessary to delete files, but assures that no file versions are left behind.

restic#3161 restic#3885
Bugfix #3336: Make SFTP backend report no space left on device

Backing up to an SFTP backend would spew repeated SSH_FX_FAILURE messages when the remote disk was full. Restic now reports "sftp: no space left on device" and exits immediately when it detects this condition.

A fix for this issue was implemented in restic 0.12.1, but unfortunately the fix itself contained a bug that prevented it from taking effect.

restic#3336 restic#3345 restic#4075
Bugfix #3567: Improve handling of interrupted syscalls in mount command

Accessing restic's FUSE mount could result in "input/output" errors when using programs in which syscalls can be interrupted. This is for example the case for Go programs. This has now been fixed by improved error handling of interrupted syscalls.

restic#3567 restic#3694 restic#3875
Bugfix #3897: Fix stuck copy command when -o <backend>.connections=1

When running the copy command with -o <backend>.connections=1 the command would be infinitely stuck. This has now been fixed.

restic#3897 restic#3898
Bugfix #3918: Correct prune statistics for partially compressed repositories

In a partially compressed repository, one data blob can exist both in an uncompressed and a compressed version. This caused the prune statistics to become inaccurate and e.g. report a too high value for the unused size, such as "unused size after prune: 16777215.991 TiB". This has now been fixed.

restic#3918 restic#3980
Bugfix #3951: Make ls return exit code 1 if snapshot cannot be loaded

The ls command used to show a warning and return exit code 0 when failing to load a snapshot. This has now been fixed such that it instead returns exit code 1 (still showing a warning).

restic#3951
Bugfix #4003: Make backup no longer hang on Solaris when seeing a FIFO file

The backup command used to hang on Solaris whenever it encountered a FIFO file (named pipe), due to a bug in the handling of extended attributes. This bug has now been fixed.

restic#4003 restic#4053
Bugfix #4016: Support ExFAT-formatted local backends on macOS Ventura

ExFAT-formatted disks could not be used as local backends starting from macOS Ventura. Restic commands would fail with an "inappropriate ioctl for device" error. This has now been fixed.

restic#4016 restic#4021
Bugfix #4085: Make init ignore "Access Denied" errors when creating S3 buckets

In restic 0.9.0 through 0.13.0, the init command ignored some permission errors from S3 backends when trying to check for bucket existence, so that manually created buckets with custom permissions could be used for backups.

This feature became broken in 0.14.0, but has now been restored again.

restic#4085 restic#4086
Bugfix #4100: Make self-update enabled by default only in release builds

The self-update command was previously included by default in all builds of restic as opposed to only in official release builds, even if the selfupdate tag was not explicitly enabled when building.

This has now been corrected, and the self-update command is only available if restic was built with -tags selfupdate (as done for official release builds by build.go).

restic#4100
Bugfix #4103: Don't generate negative UIDs and GIDs in tar files from dump

When using a 32-bit build of restic, the dump command could in some cases create tar files containing negative UIDs and GIDs, which cannot be read by GNU tar. This corner case especially applies to backups from stdin on Windows.

This is now fixed such that dump creates valid tar files in these cases too.

restic#4103 restic#4104
Change #2724: Include full snapshot ID in JSON output of backup

We have changed the JSON output of the backup command to include the full snapshot ID instead of just a shortened version, as the latter can be ambiguous in some rare cases. To derive the short ID, please truncate the full ID down to eight characters.

restic#2724 restic#3993
Change #3929: Make unlock display message only when locks were actually removed

The unlock command used to print the "successfully removed locks" message whenever it was run, regardless of lock files having being removed or not.

This has now been changed such that it only prints the message if any lock files were actually removed. In addition, it also reports the number of removed lock files.

restic#3929 restic#3935
Change #4033: Don't print skipped snapshots by default in copy command

The copy command used to print each snapshot that was skipped because it already existed in the target repository. The amount of this output could practically bury the list of snapshots that were actually copied.

From now on, the skipped snapshots are by default not printed at all, but this can be re-enabled by increasing the verbosity level of the command.

restic#4033 restic#4066
Change #4041: Update dependencies and require Go 1.18 or newer

Most dependencies have been updated. Since some libraries require newer language features, support for Go 1.15-1.17 has been dropped, which means that restic now requires at least Go 1.18 to build.

restic#4041
Enhancement #14: Implement rewrite command

Restic now has a rewrite command which allows to rewrite existing snapshots to remove unwanted files.

restic#14 restic#2731 restic#4079
Enhancement #79: Restore files with long runs of zeros as sparse files

When using restore --sparse, the restorer may now write files containing long runs of zeros as sparse files (also called files with holes), where the zeros are not actually written to disk.

How much space is saved by writing sparse files depends on the operating system, file system and the distribution of zeros in the file.

During backup restic still reads the whole file including sparse regions, but with optimized processing speed of sparse regions.

restic#79 restic#3903 restic#2601 restic#3854 https://forum.restic.net/t/sparse-file-support/1264
Enhancement #1078: Support restoring symbolic links on Windows

The restore command now supports restoring symbolic links on Windows. Because of Windows specific restrictions this is only possible when running restic with the SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege privilege or as an administrator.

restic#1078 restic#2699 restic#2875
Enhancement #1734: Inform about successful retries after errors

When a recoverable error is encountered, restic shows a warning message saying that it's retrying, e.g.:

Save(<data/956b9ced99>) returned error, retrying after 357.131936ms: ...

This message can be confusing in that it never clearly states whether the retry is successful or not. This has now been fixed such that restic follows up with a message confirming a successful retry, e.g.:

Save(<data/956b9ced99>) operation successful after 1 retries

restic#1734 restic#2661
Enhancement #1866: Improve handling of directories with duplicate entries

If for some reason a directory contains a duplicate entry, the backup command would previously fail with a node "path/to/file" already present or nodes are not ordered got "path/to/file", last "path/to/file" error.

The error handling has been improved to only report a warning in this case. Make sure to check that the filesystem in question is not damaged if you see this!

restic#1866 restic#3937 restic#3880
Enhancement #2134: Support B2 API keys restricted to hiding but not deleting files

When the B2 backend does not have the necessary permissions to permanently delete files, it now automatically falls back to hiding files. This allows using restic with an application key which is not allowed to delete files. This can prevent an attacker from deleting backups with such an API key.

To use this feature create an application key without the deleteFiles capability. It is recommended to restrict the key to just one bucket. For example using the b2 command line tool:

b2 create-key --bucket <bucketName> <keyName> listBuckets,readFiles,writeFiles,listFiles

Alternatively, you can use the S3 backend to access B2, as described in the documentation. In this mode, files are also only hidden instead of being deleted permanently.

restic#2134 restic#2398
Enhancement #2152: Make init open only one connection for the SFTP backend

The init command using the SFTP backend used to connect twice to the repository. This could be inconvenient if the user must enter a password, or cause init to fail if the server does not correctly close the first SFTP connection.

This has now been fixed by reusing the first/initial SFTP connection opened.

restic#2152 restic#3882
Enhancement #2533: Handle cache corruption on disk and in downloads

In rare situations, like for example after a system crash, the data stored in the cache might be corrupted. This could cause restic to fail and required manually deleting the cache.

Restic now automatically removes broken data from the cache, allowing it to recover from such a situation without user intervention. In addition, restic retries downloads which return corrupt data in order to also handle temporary download problems.

restic#2533 restic#3521
Enhancement #2715: Stricter repository lock handling

Previously, restic commands kept running even if they failed to refresh their locks in time. This could be a problem e.g. in case the client system running a backup entered the standby power mode while the backup was still in progress (which would prevent the client from refreshing its lock), and after a short delay another host successfully runs unlock and prune on the repository, which would remove all data added by the in-progress backup. If the backup client later continues its backup, even though its lock had expired in the meantime, this would lead to an incomplete snapshot.

To address this, lock handling is now much stricter. Commands requiring a lock are canceled if the lock is not refreshed successfully in time. In addition, if a lock file is not readable restic will not allow starting a command. It may be necessary to remove invalid lock files manually or use unlock --remove-all. Please make sure that no other restic processes are running concurrently before doing this, however.

restic#2715 restic#3569
Enhancement #2750: Make backup file read concurrency configurable

The backup command now supports a --read-concurrency option which allows tuning restic for very fast storage like NVMe disks by controlling the number of concurrent file reads during the backup process.

restic#2750
Enhancement #3029: Add support for credential_process to S3 backend

Restic now uses a newer library for the S3 backend, which adds support for the credential_process option in the AWS credential configuration.

restic#3029 restic#4034 restic#4025
Enhancement #3096: Make mount command support macOS using macFUSE 4.x

Restic now uses a different FUSE library for mounting snapshots and making them available as a FUSE filesystem using the mount command. This adds support for macFUSE 4.x which can be used to make this work on recent macOS versions.

restic#3096 restic#4024
Enhancement #3124: Support JSON output for the init command

The init command used to ignore the --json option, but now outputs a JSON message if the repository was created successfully.

restic#3124 restic#3132
Enhancement #3899: Optimize prune memory usage

The prune command needs large amounts of memory in order to determine what to keep and what to remove. This is now optimized to use up to 30% less memory.

restic#3899
Enhancement #3905: Improve speed of parent snapshot detection in backup command

Backing up a large number of files using --files-from-verbatim or --files-from-raw options could require a long time to find the parent snapshot. This has been improved.

restic#3905
Enhancement #3915: Add compression statistics to the stats command

When executed with --mode raw-data on a repository that supports compression, the stats command now calculates and displays, for the selected repository or snapshots: the uncompressed size of the data; the compression progress (percentage of data that has been compressed); the compression ratio of the compressed data; the total space saving.

It also takes into account both the compressed and uncompressed data if the repository is only partially compressed.

restic#3915
Enhancement #3925: Provide command completion for PowerShell

Restic already provided generation of completion files for bash, fish and zsh. Now powershell is supported, too.

https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/3925/files
Enhancement #3931: Allow backup file tree scanner to be disabled

The backup command walks the file tree in a separate scanner process to find the total size and file/directory count, and uses this to provide an ETA. This can slow down backups, especially of network filesystems.

The command now has a new option --no-scan which can be used to disable this scanning in order to speed up backups when needed.

restic#3931
Enhancement #3932: Improve handling of ErrDot errors in rclone and sftp backends

Since Go 1.19, restic can no longer implicitly run relative executables which are found in the current directory (e.g. rclone if found in .). This is a security feature of Go to prevent against running unintended and possibly harmful executables.

The error message for this was just "cannot run executable found relative to current directory". This has now been improved to yield a more specific error message, informing the user how to explicitly allow running the executable using the -o rclone.program and -o sftp.command extended options with ./.

restic#3932 https://pkg.go.dev/os/exec#hdr-Executables_in_the_current_directory https://go.dev/blog/path-security
Enhancement #3943: Ignore additional/unknown files in repository

If a restic repository had additional files in it (not created by restic), commands like find and restore could become confused and fail with an multiple IDs with prefix "12345678" found error. These commands now ignore such additional files.

restic#3943 https://forum.restic.net/t/which-protocol-should-i-choose-for-remote-linux-backups/5446/17
Enhancement #3955: Improve backup performance for small files

When backing up small files restic was slower than it could be. In particular this affected backups using maximum compression.

This has been fixed by reworking the internal parallelism of the backup command, making it back up small files around two times faster.

restic#3955

Changelog for restic 0.14.0 (2022-08-25)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.14.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #2248: Support self-update on Windows
Fix #3428: List snapshots in backend at most once to resolve snapshot IDs
Fix #3432: Fix rare 'not found in repository' error for copy command
Fix #3681: Fix rclone (shimmed by Scoop) and sftp not working on Windows
Fix #3685: The diff command incorrectly listed some files as added
Fix #3716: Print "wrong password" to stderr instead of stdout
Fix #3720: Directory sync errors for repositories accessed via SMB
Fix #3736: The stats command miscalculated restore size for multiple snapshots
Fix #3772: Correctly rebuild index for legacy repositories
Fix #3776: Limit number of key files tested while opening a repository
Fix #3861: Yield error on invalid policy to forget
Chg #1842: Support debug log creation in release builds
Chg #3295: Deprecate check --check-unused and add further checks
Chg #3680: Update dependencies and require Go 1.15 or newer
Chg #3742: Replace --repo2 option used by init/copy with --from-repo
Enh #21: Add compression support
Enh #1153: Support pruning even when the disk is full
Enh #2162: Adaptive IO concurrency based on backend connections
Enh #2291: Allow pack size customization
Enh #2295: Allow use of SAS token to authenticate to Azure
Enh #2351: Use config file permissions to control file group access
Enh #2696: Improve backup speed with many small files
Enh #2907: Make snapshot directory structure of mount command customizable
Enh #2923: Improve speed of copy command
Enh #3114: Optimize handling of duplicate blobs in prune
Enh #3465: Improve handling of temporary files on Windows
Enh #3475: Allow limiting IO concurrency for local and SFTP backend
Enh #3484: Stream data in check and prune commands
Enh #3709: Validate exclude patterns before backing up
Enh #3729: Display full IDs in check warnings
Enh #3773: Optimize memory usage for directories with many files
Enh #3819: Validate include/exclude patterns before restoring
Enh #3837: Improve SFTP repository initialization over slow links

Details

Bugfix #2248: Support self-update on Windows

Restic self-update would fail in situations where the operating system locks running binaries, including Windows. The new behavior works around this by renaming the running file and swapping the updated file in place.

restic#2248 restic#3675
Bugfix #3428: List snapshots in backend at most once to resolve snapshot IDs

Many commands support specifying a list of snapshot IDs which are then used to determine the snapshots to be processed by the command. To resolve snapshot IDs or latest, and check that these exist, restic previously listed all snapshots stored in the repository. Depending on the backend this could be a slow and/or expensive operation.

Restic now lists the snapshots only once and remembers the result in order to resolve all further snapshot IDs swiftly.

restic#3428 restic#3570 restic#3395
Bugfix #3432: Fix rare 'not found in repository' error for copy command

In rare cases copy (and other commands) would report that LoadTree(...) returned an id [...] not found in repository error. This could be caused by a backup or copy command running concurrently. The error was only temporary; running the failed restic command a second time as a workaround did resolve the error.

This issue has now been fixed by correcting the order in which restic reads data from the repository. It is now guaranteed that restic only loads snapshots for which all necessary data is already available.

restic#3432 restic#3570
Bugfix #3681: Fix rclone (shimmed by Scoop) and sftp not working on Windows

In #3602 a fix was introduced to address the problem of rclone prematurely exiting when Ctrl+C is pressed on Windows. The solution was to create the subprocess with its console detached from the restic console.

However, this solution failed when using rclone installed by Scoop or using sftp with a passphrase-protected private key. We've now fixed this by using a different approach to prevent Ctrl-C from passing down too early.

restic#3681 restic#3692 restic#3696
Bugfix #3685: The diff command incorrectly listed some files as added

There was a bug in the diff command, causing it to always show files in a removed directory as added. This has now been fixed.

restic#3685 restic#3686
Bugfix #3716: Print "wrong password" to stderr instead of stdout

If an invalid password was entered, the error message was printed on stdout and not on stderr as intended. This has now been fixed.

restic#3716 https://forum.restic.net/t/4965
Bugfix #3720: Directory sync errors for repositories accessed via SMB

On Linux and macOS, accessing a repository via a SMB/CIFS mount resulted in restic failing to save the lock file, yielding the following errors:

Save(<lock/071fe833f0>) returned error, retrying after 552.330144ms: sync /repo/locks: no such file or directory Save(<lock/bf789d7343>) returned error, retrying after 552.330144ms: sync /repo/locks: invalid argument

This has now been fixed by ignoring the relevant error codes.

restic#3720 restic#3751 restic#3752
Bugfix #3736: The stats command miscalculated restore size for multiple snapshots

Since restic 0.10.0 the restore size calculated by the stats command for multiple snapshots was too low. The hardlink detection was accidentally applied across multiple snapshots and thus ignored many files. This has now been fixed.

restic#3736 restic#3740
Bugfix #3772: Correctly rebuild index for legacy repositories

After running rebuild-index on a legacy repository containing mixed pack files (that is, pack files which store both metadata and file data), check printed warnings like pack 12345678 contained in several indexes: .... This warning was not critical, but has now nonetheless been fixed by properly handling mixed pack files while rebuilding the index.

Running prune for such legacy repositories will also fix the warning by reorganizing the pack files which caused it.

restic#3772 restic#3884 https://forum.restic.net/t/5044/13
Bugfix #3776: Limit number of key files tested while opening a repository

Previously, restic tested the password against every key in the repository when opening a repository. The more keys there were in the repository, the slower this operation became.

Restic now tests the password against up to 20 key files in the repository. Alternatively, you can use the --key-hint=<key ID> option to specify a specific key file to use instead.

restic#3776
Bugfix #3861: Yield error on invalid policy to forget

The forget command previously silently ignored invalid/unsupported units in the duration options, such as e.g. --keep-within-daily 2w.

Specifying an invalid/unsupported duration unit now results in an error.

restic#3861 restic#3862
Change #1842: Support debug log creation in release builds

Creating a debug log was only possible in debug builds which required users to manually build restic. We changed the release builds to allow creating debug logs by simply setting the environment variable DEBUG_LOG=logname.log.

restic#1842 restic#3826
Change #3295: Deprecate check --check-unused and add further checks

Since restic 0.12.0, it is expected to still have unused blobs after running prune. This made the --check-unused option of the check command rather useless and tended to confuse users. This option has been deprecated and is now ignored.

The check command now also warns if a repository is using either the legacy S3 layout or mixed pack files with both tree and data blobs. The latter is known to cause performance problems.

restic#3295 restic#3730
Change #3680: Update dependencies and require Go 1.15 or newer

We've updated most dependencies. Since some libraries require newer language features we're dropping support for Go 1.14, which means that restic now requires at least Go 1.15 to build.

restic#3680 restic#3883
Change #3742: Replace --repo2 option used by init/copy with --from-repo

The init and copy commands can read data from another repository. However, confusingly --repo2 referred to the repository from which the init command copies parameters, but for the copy command --repo2 referred to the copy destination.

We've introduced a new option, --from-repo, which always refers to the source repository for both commands. The old parameter names have been deprecated but still work. To create a new repository and copy all snapshots to it, the commands are now as follows:
```
--copy-chunker-params restic -r /srv/restic-repo-copy copy --from-repo
/srv/restic-repo ```

https://github.com/restic/restic/pull/3742
https://forum.restic.net/t/5017
```
Enhancement #21: Add compression support

We've added compression support to the restic repository format. To create a repository using the new format run init --repository-version 2. Please note that the repository cannot be read by restic versions prior to 0.14.0.

You can configure whether data is compressed with the option --compression. It can be set to auto (the default, which will compress very fast), max (which will trade backup speed and CPU usage for better compression), or off (which disables compression). Each setting is only applied for the current run of restic and does not apply to future runs. The option can also be set via the environment variable RESTIC_COMPRESSION.

To upgrade in place run migrate upgrade_repo_v2 followed by prune. See the documentation for more details. The migration checks the repository integrity and upgrades the repository format, but will not change any data. Afterwards, prune will rewrite the metadata to make use of compression.

As an alternative you can use the copy command to migrate snapshots; First create a new repository using init --repository-version 2 --copy-chunker-params --repo2 path/to/old/repo, and then use the copy command to copy all snapshots to the new repository.

restic#21 restic#3779 restic#3666 restic#3704 restic#3733
Enhancement #1153: Support pruning even when the disk is full

When running out of disk space it was no longer possible to add or remove data from a repository. To help with recovering from such a deadlock, the prune command now supports an --unsafe-recover-no-free-space option to recover from these situations. Make sure to read the documentation first!

restic#1153 restic#3481
Enhancement #2162: Adaptive IO concurrency based on backend connections

Many commands used hard-coded limits for the number of concurrent operations. This prevented speed improvements by increasing the number of connections used by a backend.

These limits have now been replaced by using the configured number of backend connections instead, which can be controlled using the -o <backend-name>.connections=5 option. Commands will then automatically scale their parallelism accordingly.

To limit the number of CPU cores used by restic, you can set the environment variable GOMAXPROCS accordingly. For example to use a single CPU core, use GOMAXPROCS=1.

restic#2162 restic#1467 restic#3611
Enhancement #2291: Allow pack size customization

Restic now uses a target pack size of 16 MiB by default. This can be customized using the --pack-size size option. Supported pack sizes range between 4 and 128 MiB.

It is possible to migrate an existing repository to larger pack files using prune --repack-small. This will rewrite every pack file which is significantly smaller than the target size.

restic#2291 restic#3731
Enhancement #2295: Allow use of SAS token to authenticate to Azure

Previously restic only supported AccountKeys to authenticate to Azure storage accounts, which necessitates giving a significant amount of access.

We added support for Azure SAS tokens which are a more fine-grained and time-limited manner of granting access. Set the AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME and AZURE_ACCOUNT_SAS environment variables to use a SAS token for authentication. Note that if AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY is set, it will take precedence.

restic#2295 restic#3661
Enhancement #2351: Use config file permissions to control file group access

Previously files in a local/SFTP repository would always end up with very restrictive access permissions, allowing access only to the owner. This prevented a number of valid use-cases involving groups and ACLs.

We now use the permissions of the config file in the repository to decide whether group access should be given to newly created repository files or not. We arrange for repository files to be created group readable exactly when the repository config file is group readable.

To opt-in to group readable repositories, a simple chmod -R g+r or equivalent on the config file can be used. For repositories that should be writable by group members a tad more setup is required, see the docs.

Posix ACLs can also be used now that the group permissions being forced to zero no longer masks the effect of ACL entries.

restic#2351 restic#3419 https://forum.restic.net/t/1391
Enhancement #2696: Improve backup speed with many small files

We have restructured the backup pipeline to continue reading files while all upload connections are busy. This allows the backup to already prepare the next data file such that the upload can continue as soon as a connection becomes available. This can especially improve the backup performance for high latency backends.

The upload concurrency is now controlled using the -o <backend-name>.connections=5 option.

restic#2696 restic#3489
Enhancement #2907: Make snapshot directory structure of mount command customizable

We've added the possibility to customize the snapshot directory structure of the mount command using templates passed to the --snapshot-template option. The formatting of snapshots' timestamps is now controlled using --time-template and supports subdirectories to for example group snapshots by year. Please see restic help mount for further details.

Characters in tag names which are not allowed in a filename are replaced by underscores _. For example a tag foo/bar will result in a directory name of foo_bar.

restic#2907 restic#2913 restic#3691
Enhancement #2923: Improve speed of copy command

The copy command could require a long time to copy snapshots for non-local backends. This has been improved to provide a throughput comparable to the restore command.

Additionally, copy now displays a progress bar.

restic#2923 restic#3513
Enhancement #3114: Optimize handling of duplicate blobs in prune

Restic prune always used to repack all data files containing duplicate blobs. This effectively removed all duplicates during prune. However, as a consequence all these data files were repacked even if the unused repository space threshold could be reached with less work.

This is now changed and prune works nice and fast even when there are lots of duplicate blobs.

restic#3114 restic#3290
Enhancement #3465: Improve handling of temporary files on Windows

In some cases restic failed to delete temporary files, causing the current command to fail. This has now been fixed by ensuring that Windows automatically deletes the file. In addition, temporary files are only written to disk when necessary, reducing disk writes.

restic#3465 restic#1551 restic#3610
Enhancement #3475: Allow limiting IO concurrency for local and SFTP backend

Restic did not support limiting the IO concurrency / number of connections for accessing repositories stored using the local or SFTP backends. The number of connections is now limited as for other backends, and can be configured via the the -o local.connections=2 and -o sftp.connections=5 options. This ensures that restic does not overwhelm the backend with concurrent IO operations.

restic#3475
Enhancement #3484: Stream data in check and prune commands

The commands check --read-data and prune previously downloaded data files into temporary files which could end up being written to disk. This could cause a large amount of data being written to disk.

The pack files are now instead streamed, which removes the need for temporary files. Please note that uploads during backup and prune still require temporary files.

restic#3710 restic#3484 restic#3717
Enhancement #3709: Validate exclude patterns before backing up

Exclude patterns provided via --exclude, --iexclude, --exclude-file or --iexclude-file previously weren't validated. As a consequence, invalid patterns resulted in files that were meant to be excluded being backed up.

Restic now validates all patterns before running the backup and aborts with a fatal error if an invalid pattern is detected.

restic#3709 restic#3734
Enhancement #3729: Display full IDs in check warnings

When running commands to inspect or repair a damaged repository, it is often necessary to supply the full IDs of objects stored in the repository.

The output of check now includes full IDs instead of their shortened variant.

restic#3729
Enhancement #3773: Optimize memory usage for directories with many files

Backing up a directory with hundreds of thousands or more files caused restic to require large amounts of memory. We've now optimized the backup command such that it requires up to 30% less memory.

restic#3773
Enhancement #3819: Validate include/exclude patterns before restoring

Patterns provided to restore via --exclude, --iexclude, --include and --iinclude weren't validated before running the restore. Invalid patterns would result in error messages being printed repeatedly, and possibly unwanted files being restored.

Restic now validates all patterns before running the restore, and aborts with a fatal error if an invalid pattern is detected.

restic#3819
Enhancement #3837: Improve SFTP repository initialization over slow links

The init command, when used on an SFTP backend, now sends multiple mkdir commands to the backend concurrently. This reduces the waiting times when creating a repository over a very slow connection.

restic#3837 restic#3840

Changelog for restic 0.13.0 (2022-03-26)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.13.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1106: Never lock repository for list locks
Fix #2345: Make cache crash-resistant and usable by multiple concurrent processes
Fix #2452: Improve error handling of repository locking
Fix #2738: Don't print progress for backup --json --quiet
Fix #3382: Make check command honor RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable
Fix #3488: rebuild-index failed if an index file was damaged
Fix #3518: Make copy command honor --no-lock for source repository
Fix #3556: Fix hang with Backblaze B2 on SSL certificate authority error
Fix #3591: Fix handling of prune --max-repack-size=0
Fix #3601: Fix rclone backend prematurely exiting when receiving SIGINT on Windows
Fix #3619: Avoid choosing parent snapshots newer than time of new snapshot
Fix #3667: The mount command now reports symlinks sizes
Chg #3519: Require Go 1.14 or newer
Chg #3641: Ignore parent snapshot for backup --stdin
Enh #233: Support negative include/exclude patterns
Enh #1542: Add --dry-run/-n option to backup command
Enh #2202: Add upload checksum for Azure, GS, S3 and Swift backends
Enh #2388: Add warning for S3 if partial credentials are provided
Enh #2508: Support JSON output and quiet mode for the diff command
Enh #2594: Speed up the restore --verify command
Enh #2656: Add flag to disable TLS verification for self-signed certificates
Enh #2816: The backup command no longer updates file access times on Linux
Enh #2880: Make recover collect only unreferenced trees
Enh #3003: Atomic uploads for the SFTP backend
Enh #3127: Add xattr (extended attributes) support for Solaris
Enh #3429: Verify that new or modified keys are stored correctly
Enh #3436: Improve local backend's resilience to (system) crashes
Enh #3464: Skip lock creation on forget if --no-lock and --dry-run
Enh #3490: Support random subset by size in check --read-data-subset
Enh #3508: Cache blobs read by the dump command
Enh #3511: Support configurable timeout for the rclone backend
Enh #3541: Improve handling of temporary B2 delete errors
Enh #3542: Add file mode in symbolic notation to ls --json
Enh #3593: Improve copy performance by parallelizing IO

Details

Bugfix #1106: Never lock repository for list locks

The list locks command previously locked to the repository by default. This had the problem that it wouldn't work for an exclusively locked repository and that the command would also display its own lock file which can be confusing.

Now, the list locks command never locks the repository.

restic#1106 restic#3665
Bugfix #2345: Make cache crash-resistant and usable by multiple concurrent processes

The restic cache directory (RESTIC_CACHE_DIR) could end up in a broken state in the event of restic (or the OS) crashing. This is now less likely to occur as files are downloaded to a temporary location before being moved to their proper location.

This also allows multiple concurrent restic processes to operate on a single repository without conflicts. Previously, concurrent operations could cause segfaults because the processes saw each other's partially downloaded files.

restic#2345 restic#2838
Bugfix #2452: Improve error handling of repository locking

Previously, when the lock refresh failed to delete the old lock file, it forgot about the newly created one. Instead it continued trying to delete the old (usually no longer existing) lock file and thus over time lots of lock files accumulated. This has now been fixed.

restic#2452 restic#2473 restic#2562 restic#3512
Bugfix #2738: Don't print progress for backup --json --quiet

Unlike the text output, the --json output format still printed progress information even in --quiet mode. This has now been fixed by always disabling the progress output in quiet mode.

restic#2738 restic#3264
Bugfix #3382: Make check command honor RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable

Previously, the check command didn't honor the RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable, which caused problems in certain system/usage configurations. This has now been fixed.

restic#3382 restic#3474
Bugfix #3488: rebuild-index failed if an index file was damaged

Previously, the rebuild-index command would fail with an error if an index file was damaged or truncated. This has now been fixed.

On older restic versions, a (slow) workaround is to use rebuild-index --read-all-packs or to manually delete the damaged index.

restic#3488
Bugfix #3518: Make copy command honor --no-lock for source repository

The copy command previously did not respect the --no-lock option for the source repository, causing failures with read-only storage backends. This has now been fixed such that the option is now respected.

restic#3518 restic#3589
Bugfix #3556: Fix hang with Backblaze B2 on SSL certificate authority error

Previously, if a request failed with an SSL unknown certificate authority error, the B2 backend retried indefinitely and restic would appear to hang.

This has now been fixed and restic instead fails with an error message.

restic#3556 restic#2355 restic#3571
Bugfix #3591: Fix handling of prune --max-repack-size=0

Restic ignored the --max-repack-size option when passing a value of 0. This has now been fixed.

As a workaround, --max-repack-size=1 can be used with older versions of restic.

restic#3591
Bugfix #3601: Fix rclone backend prematurely exiting when receiving SIGINT on Windows

Previously, pressing Ctrl+C in a Windows console where restic was running with rclone as the backend would cause rclone to exit prematurely due to getting a SIGINT signal at the same time as restic. Restic would then wait for a long time for time with "unexpected EOF" and "rclone stdio connection already closed" errors.

This has now been fixed by restic starting the rclone process detached from the console restic runs in (similar to starting processes in a new process group on Linux), which enables restic to gracefully clean up rclone (which now never gets the SIGINT).

restic#3601 restic#3602
Bugfix #3619: Avoid choosing parent snapshots newer than time of new snapshot

The backup command, when a --parent was not provided, previously chose the most recent matching snapshot as the parent snapshot. However, this didn't make sense when the user passed --time to create a new snapshot older than the most recent snapshot.

Instead, backup now chooses the most recent snapshot which is not newer than the snapshot-being-created's timestamp, to avoid any time travel.

restic#3619
Bugfix #3667: The mount command now reports symlinks sizes

Symlinks used to have size zero in restic mountpoints, confusing some third-party tools. They now have a size equal to the byte length of their target path, as required by POSIX.

restic#3667 restic#3668
Change #3519: Require Go 1.14 or newer

Restic now requires Go 1.14 to build. This allows it to use new standard library features instead of an external dependency.

restic#3519
Change #3641: Ignore parent snapshot for backup --stdin

Restic uses a parent snapshot to speed up directory scanning when performing backups, but this only wasted time and memory when the backup source is stdin (using the --stdin option of the backup command), since no directory scanning is performed in this case.

Snapshots made with backup --stdin no longer have a parent snapshot, which allows restic to skip some startup operations and saves a bit of resources.

The --parent option is still available for backup --stdin, but is now ignored.

restic#3641 restic#3645
Enhancement #233: Support negative include/exclude patterns

If a pattern starts with an exclamation mark and it matches a file that was previously matched by a regular pattern, the match is cancelled. Notably, this can be used with --exclude-file to cancel the exclusion of some files.

It works similarly to .gitignore, with the same limitation; Once a directory is excluded, it is not possible to include files inside the directory.

Example of use as an exclude pattern for the backup command:

$HOME/**/* !$HOME/Documents !$HOME/code !$HOME/.emacs.d !$HOME/games # [...] node_modules *~ *.o *.lo .pyc # [...] $HOME/code/linux/ !$HOME/code/linux/.git # [...]

restic#233 restic#2311
Enhancement #1542: Add --dry-run/-n option to backup command

Testing exclude filters and other configuration options was error prone as wrong filters could cause files to be uploaded unintentionally. It was also not possible to estimate beforehand how much data would be uploaded.

The backup command now has a --dry-run/-n option, which performs all the normal steps of a backup without actually writing anything to the repository.

Passing -vv will log information about files that would be added, allowing for verification of source and exclusion options before running the real backup.

restic#1542 restic#2308 restic#3210 restic#3300
Enhancement #2202: Add upload checksum for Azure, GS, S3 and Swift backends

Previously only the B2 and partially the Swift backends verified the integrity of uploaded (encrypted) files. The verification works by informing the backend about the expected hash of the uploaded file. The backend then verifies the upload and thereby rules out any data corruption during upload.

We have now added upload checksums for the Azure, GS, S3 and Swift backends, which besides integrity checking for uploads also means that restic can now be used to store backups in S3 buckets which have Object Lock enabled.

restic#2202 restic#2700 restic#3023 restic#3246
Enhancement #2388: Add warning for S3 if partial credentials are provided

Previously restic did not notify about incomplete credentials when using the S3 backend, instead just reporting access denied.

Restic now checks that both the AWS key ID and secret environment variables are set before connecting to the remote server, and reports an error if not.

restic#2388 restic#3532
Enhancement #2508: Support JSON output and quiet mode for the diff command

The diff command now supports outputting machine-readable output in JSON format. To enable this, pass the --json option to the command. To only print the summary and suppress detailed output, pass the --quiet option.

restic#2508 restic#3592
Enhancement #2594: Speed up the restore --verify command

The --verify option lets the restore command verify the file content after it has restored a snapshot. The performance of this operation has now been improved by up to a factor of two.

restic#2594
Enhancement #2656: Add flag to disable TLS verification for self-signed certificates

There is now an --insecure-tls global option in restic, which disables TLS verification for self-signed certificates in order to support some development workflows.

restic#2656 restic#2657
Enhancement #2816: The backup command no longer updates file access times on Linux

When reading files during backup, restic used to cause the operating system to update the files' access times. Note that this did not apply to filesystems with disabled file access times.

Restic now instructs the operating system not to update the file access time, if the user running restic is the file owner or has root permissions.

restic#2816
Enhancement #2880: Make recover collect only unreferenced trees

Previously, the recover command used to generate a snapshot containing all root trees, even those which were already referenced by a snapshot.

This has been improved such that it now only processes trees not already referenced by any snapshot.

restic#2880
Enhancement #3003: Atomic uploads for the SFTP backend

The SFTP backend did not upload files atomically. An interrupted upload could leave an incomplete file behind which could prevent restic from accessing the repository. This has now been fixed and uploads in the SFTP backend are done atomically.

restic#3003 restic#3524
Enhancement #3127: Add xattr (extended attributes) support for Solaris

Restic now supports xattr for the Solaris operating system.

restic#3127 restic#3628
Enhancement #3429: Verify that new or modified keys are stored correctly

When adding a new key or changing the password of a key, restic used to just create the new key (and remove the old one, when changing the password). There was no verification that the new key was stored correctly and works properly. As the repository cannot be decrypted without a valid key file, this could in rare cases cause the repository to become inaccessible.

Restic now checks that new key files actually work before continuing. This can protect against some (rare) cases of hardware or storage problems.

restic#3429
Enhancement #3436: Improve local backend's resilience to (system) crashes

Restic now ensures that files stored using the local backend are created atomically (that is, files are either stored completely or not at all). This ensures that no incomplete files are left behind even if restic is terminated while writing a file.

In addition, restic now tries to ensure that the directory in the repository which contains a newly uploaded file is also written to disk. This can prevent missing files if the system crashes or the disk is not properly unmounted.

restic#3436
Enhancement #3464: Skip lock creation on forget if --no-lock and --dry-run

Restic used to silently ignore the --no-lock option of the forget command.

It now skips creation of lock file in case both --dry-run and --no-lock are specified. If --no-lock option is specified without --dry-run, restic prints a warning message to stderr.

restic#3464 restic#3623
Enhancement #3490: Support random subset by size in check --read-data-subset

The --read-data-subset option of the check command now supports a third way of specifying the subset to check, namely nS where n is a size in bytes with suffix S as k/K, m/M, g/G or t/T.

restic#3490 restic#3548
Enhancement #3508: Cache blobs read by the dump command

When dumping a file using the dump command, restic did not cache blobs in any way, so even consecutive runs of the same blob were loaded from the repository again and again, slowing down the dump.

Now, the caching mechanism already used by the fuse command is also used by the dump command. This makes dumping much faster, especially for sparse files.

restic#3508
Enhancement #3511: Support configurable timeout for the rclone backend

A slow rclone backend could cause restic to time out while waiting for the repository to open. Restic now offers an -o rclone.timeout option to make this timeout configurable.

restic#3511 restic#3514
Enhancement #3541: Improve handling of temporary B2 delete errors

Deleting files on B2 could sometimes fail temporarily, which required restic to retry the delete operation. In some cases the file was deleted nevertheless, causing the retries and ultimately the restic command to fail. This has now been fixed.

restic#3541 restic#3544
Enhancement #3542: Add file mode in symbolic notation to ls --json

The ls --json command now provides the file mode in symbolic notation (using the permissions key), aligned with find --json.

restic#3542 restic#3573 https://forum.restic.net/t/restic-ls-understanding-file-mode-with-json/4371
Enhancement #3593: Improve copy performance by parallelizing IO

Restic copy previously only used a single thread for copying blobs between repositories, which resulted in limited performance when copying small blobs to/from a high latency backend (i.e. any remote backend, especially b2).

Copying will now use 8 parallel threads to increase the throughput of the copy operation.

restic#3593

Changelog for restic 0.12.1 (2021-08-03)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.12.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #2742: Improve error handling for rclone and REST backend over HTTP2
Fix #3111: Fix terminal output redirection for PowerShell
Fix #3184: backup --quiet no longer prints status information
Fix #3214: Treat an empty password as a fatal error for repository init
Fix #3267: copy failed to copy snapshots in rare cases
Fix #3296: Fix crash of check --read-data-subset=x% run for an empty repository
Fix #3302: Fix fdopendir: not a directory error for local backend
Fix #3305: Fix possibly missing backup summary of JSON output in case of error
Fix #3334: Print created new cache message only on a terminal
Fix #3380: Fix crash of backup --exclude='**'
Fix #3439: Correctly handle download errors during restore
Chg #3247: Empty files now have size of 0 in ls --json output
Enh #2780: Add release binaries for s390x architecture on Linux
Enh #3167: Allow specifying limit of snapshots list
Enh #3293: Add --repository-file2 option to init and copy command
Enh #3312: Add auto-completion support for fish
Enh #3336: SFTP backend now checks for disk space
Enh #3377: Add release binaries for Apple Silicon
Enh #3414: Add --keep-within-hourly option to restic forget
Enh #3426: Optimize read performance of mount command
Enh #3427: find --pack fallback to index if data file is missing
Enh #3456: Support filtering and specifying untagged snapshots

Details

Bugfix #2742: Improve error handling for rclone and REST backend over HTTP2

When retrieving data from the rclone / REST backend while also using HTTP2 restic did not detect when no data was returned at all. This could cause for example the check command to report the following error:

Pack ID does not match, want [...], got e3b0c442

This has been fixed by correctly detecting and retrying the incomplete download.

restic#2742 restic#3453 https://forum.restic.net/t/http2-stream-closed-connection-reset-context-canceled/3743/10
Bugfix #3111: Fix terminal output redirection for PowerShell

When redirecting the output of restic using PowerShell on Windows, the output contained terminal escape characters. This has been fixed by properly detecting the terminal type.

In addition, the mintty terminal now shows progress output for the backup command.

restic#3111 restic#3325
Bugfix #3184: backup --quiet no longer prints status information

A regression in the latest restic version caused the output of backup --quiet to contain large amounts of backup progress information when run using an interactive terminal. This is fixed now.

A workaround for this bug is to run restic as follows: restic backup --quiet [..] | cat -.

restic#3184 restic#3186
Bugfix #3214: Treat an empty password as a fatal error for repository init

When attempting to initialize a new repository, if an empty password was supplied, the repository would be created but the init command would return an error with a stack trace. Now, if an empty password is provided, it is treated as a fatal error, and no repository is created.

restic#3214 restic#3283
Bugfix #3267: copy failed to copy snapshots in rare cases

The copy command could in rare cases fail with the error message SaveTree(...) returned unexpected id .... This has been fixed.

On Linux/BSDs, the error could be caused by backing up symlinks with non-UTF-8 target paths. Note that, due to limitations in the repository format, these are not stored properly and should be avoided if possible.

restic#3267 restic#3310
Bugfix #3296: Fix crash of check --read-data-subset=x% run for an empty repository

The command restic check --read-data-subset=x% crashed when run for an empty repository. This has been fixed.

restic#3296 restic#3309
Bugfix #3302: Fix fdopendir: not a directory error for local backend

The check, list packs, prune and rebuild-index commands failed for the local backend when the data folder in the repository contained files. This has been fixed.

restic#3302 restic#3308
Bugfix #3305: Fix possibly missing backup summary of JSON output in case of error

When using --json output it happened from time to time that the summary output was missing in case an error occurred. This has been fixed.

restic#3305
Bugfix #3334: Print created new cache message only on a terminal

The message created new cache was printed even when the output wasn't a terminal. That broke piping restic dump output to tar or zip if cache directory didn't exist. The message is now only printed on a terminal.

restic#3334 restic#3343
Bugfix #3380: Fix crash of backup --exclude='**'

The exclude filter **, which excludes all files, caused restic to crash. This has been corrected.

restic#3380 restic#3393
Bugfix #3439: Correctly handle download errors during restore

Due to a regression in restic 0.12.0, the restore command in some cases did not retry download errors and only printed a warning. This has been fixed by retrying incomplete data downloads.

restic#3439 restic#3449
Change #3247: Empty files now have size of 0 in ls --json output

The ls --json command used to omit the sizes of empty files in its output. It now reports a size of zero explicitly for regular files, while omitting the size field for all other types.

restic#3247 restic#3257
Enhancement #2780: Add release binaries for s390x architecture on Linux

We've added release binaries for Linux using the s390x architecture.

restic#2780 restic#3452
Enhancement #3167: Allow specifying limit of snapshots list

The --last option allowed limiting the output of the snapshots command to the latest snapshot for each host. The new --latest n option allows limiting the output to the latest n snapshots.

This change deprecates the option --last in favour of --latest 1.

restic#3167
Enhancement #3293: Add --repository-file2 option to init and copy command

The init and copy command can now be used with the --repository-file2 option or the $RESTIC_REPOSITORY_FILE2 environment variable. These to options are in addition to the --repo2 flag and allow you to read the destination repository from a file.

Using both --repository-file and --repo2 options resulted in an error for the copy or init command. The handling of this combination of options has been fixed. A workaround for this issue is to only use --repo or -r and --repo2 for init or copy.

restic#3293 restic#3294
Enhancement #3312: Add auto-completion support for fish

The generate command now supports fish auto completion.

restic#3312
Enhancement #3336: SFTP backend now checks for disk space

Backing up over SFTP previously spewed multiple generic "failure" messages when the remote disk was full. It now checks for disk space before writing a file and fails immediately with a "no space left on device" message.

restic#3336 restic#3345
Enhancement #3377: Add release binaries for Apple Silicon

We've added release binaries for macOS on Apple Silicon (M1).

restic#3377 restic#3394
Enhancement #3414: Add --keep-within-hourly option to restic forget

The forget command allowed keeping a given number of hourly backups or to keep all backups within a given interval, but it was not possible to specify keeping hourly backups within a given interval.

The new --keep-within-hourly option now offers this functionality. Similar options for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly are also implemented, the new options are:

--keep-within-hourly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-daily <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-weekly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-monthly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-yearly <1y2m3d4h>

restic#3414 restic#3416 https://forum.restic.net/t/forget-policy/4014/11
Enhancement #3426: Optimize read performance of mount command

Reading large files in a mounted repository may be up to five times faster. This improvement primarily applies to repositories stored at a backend that can be accessed with low latency, like e.g. the local backend.

restic#3426
Enhancement #3427: find --pack fallback to index if data file is missing

When investigating a repository with missing data files, it might be useful to determine affected snapshots before running rebuild-index. Previously, find --pack pack-id returned no data as it required accessing the data file. Now, if the necessary data is still available in the repository index, it gets retrieved from there.

The command now also supports looking up multiple pack files in a single find run.

restic#3427 https://forum.restic.net/t/missing-packs-not-found/2600
Enhancement #3456: Support filtering and specifying untagged snapshots

It was previously not possible to specify an empty tag with the --tag and --keep-tag options. This has now been fixed, such that --tag '' and --keep-tag '' now matches snapshots without tags. This allows e.g. the snapshots and forget commands to only operate on untagged snapshots.

restic#3456 restic#3457

Changelog for restic 0.12.0 (2021-02-14)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.12.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1681: Make mount not create missing mount point directory
Fix #1800: Ignore no data available filesystem error during backup
Fix #2563: Report the correct owner of directories in FUSE mounts
Fix #2688: Make backup and tag commands separate tags by comma
Fix #2739: Make the cat command respect the --no-lock option
Fix #3014: Fix sporadic stream reset between rclone and restic
Fix #3087: The --use-fs-snapshot option now works on windows/386
Fix #3100: Do not require gs bucket permissions when running init
Fix #3111: Correctly detect output redirection for backup command on Windows
Fix #3151: Don't create invalid snapshots when backup is interrupted
Fix #3152: Do not hang until foregrounded when completed in background
Fix #3166: Improve error handling in the restore command
Fix #3232: Correct statistics for overlapping targets
Fix #3249: Improve error handling in gs backend
Chg #3095: Deleting files on Google Drive now moves them to the trash
Enh #909: Back up mountpoints as empty directories
Enh #2186: Allow specifying percentage in check --read-data-subset
Enh #2433: Make the dump command support zip format
Enh #2453: Report permanent/fatal backend errors earlier
Enh #2495: Add option to let backup trust mtime without checking ctime
Enh #2528: Add Alibaba/Aliyun OSS support in the s3 backend
Enh #2706: Configurable progress reports for non-interactive terminals
Enh #2718: Improve prune performance and make it more customizable
Enh #2941: Speed up the repacking step of the prune command
Enh #2944: Add backup options --files-from-{verbatim,raw}
Enh #3006: Speed up the rebuild-index command
Enh #3048: Add more checks for index and pack files in the check command
Enh #3083: Allow usage of deprecated S3 ListObjects API
Enh #3099: Reduce memory usage of check command
Enh #3106: Parallelize scan of snapshot content in copy and prune
Enh #3130: Parallelize reading of locks and snapshots
Enh #3147: Support additional environment variables for Swift authentication
Enh #3191: Add release binaries for MIPS architectures
Enh #3250: Add several more error checks
Enh #3254: Enable HTTP/2 for backend connections

Details

Bugfix #1681: Make mount not create missing mount point directory

When specifying a non-existent directory as mount point for the mount command, restic used to create the specified directory automatically.

This has now changed such that restic instead gives an error when the specified directory for the mount point does not exist.

restic#1681 restic#3008
Bugfix #1800: Ignore no data available filesystem error during backup

Restic was unable to backup files on some filesystems, for example certain configurations of CIFS on Linux which return a no data available error when reading extended attributes. These errors are now ignored.

restic#1800 restic#3034
Bugfix #2563: Report the correct owner of directories in FUSE mounts

Restic 0.10.0 changed the FUSE mount to always report the current user as the owner of directories within the FUSE mount, which is incorrect.

This is now changed back to reporting the correct owner of a directory.

restic#2563 restic#3141
Bugfix #2688: Make backup and tag commands separate tags by comma

Running restic backup --tag foo,bar previously created snapshots with one single tag containing a comma (foo,bar) instead of two tags (foo, bar).

Similarly, the tag command's --set, --add and --remove options would treat foo,bar as one tag instead of two tags. This was inconsistent with other commands and often unexpected when one intended foo,bar to mean two tags.

To be consistent in all commands, restic now interprets foo,bar to mean two separate tags (foo and bar) instead of one tag (foo,bar) everywhere, including in the backup and tag commands.

NOTE: This change might result in unexpected behavior in cases where you use the forget command and filter on tags like foo,bar. Snapshots previously backed up with --tag foo,bar will still not match that filter, but snapshots saved from now on will match that filter.

To replace foo,bar tags with foo and bar tags in old snapshots, you can first generate a list of the relevant snapshots using a command like:

Restic snapshots --json --quiet | jq '.[] | select(contains({tags: ["foo,bar"]})) | .id'

And then use restic tag --set foo --set bar snapshotID [...] to set the new tags. Please adjust the commands to include real tag names and any additional tags, as well as the list of snapshots to process.

restic#2688 restic#2690 restic#3197
Bugfix #2739: Make the cat command respect the --no-lock option

The cat command would not respect the --no-lock flag. This is now fixed.

restic#2739
Bugfix #3014: Fix sporadic stream reset between rclone and restic

Sometimes when using restic with the rclone backend, an error message similar to the following would be printed:

Didn't finish writing GET request (wrote 0/xxx): http2: stream closed

It was found that this was caused by restic closing the connection to rclone to soon when downloading data. A workaround has been added which waits for the end of the download before closing the connection.

rclone/rclone#2598 restic#3014
Bugfix #3087: The --use-fs-snapshot option now works on windows/386

Restic failed to create VSS snapshots on windows/386 with the following error:

GetSnapshotProperties() failed: E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057)

This is now fixed.

restic#3087 restic#3090
Bugfix #3100: Do not require gs bucket permissions when running init

Restic used to require bucket level permissions for the gs backend in order to initialize a restic repository.

It now allows a gs service account to initialize a repository if the bucket does exist and the service account has permissions to write/read to that bucket.

restic#3100
Bugfix #3111: Correctly detect output redirection for backup command on Windows

On Windows, since restic 0.10.0 the backup command did not properly detect when the output was redirected to a file. This caused restic to output terminal control characters. This has been fixed by correcting the terminal detection.

restic#3111 restic#3150
Bugfix #3151: Don't create invalid snapshots when backup is interrupted

When canceling a backup run at a certain moment it was possible that restic created a snapshot with an invalid "null" tree. This caused check and other operations to fail. The backup command now properly handles interruptions and never saves a snapshot when interrupted.

restic#3151 restic#3164
Bugfix #3152: Do not hang until foregrounded when completed in background

On Linux, when running in the background restic failed to stop the terminal output of the backup command after it had completed. This caused restic to hang until moved to the foreground. This has now been fixed.

restic#3152 https://forum.restic.net/t/restic-alpine-container-cron-hangs-epoll-pwait/3334
Bugfix #3166: Improve error handling in the restore command

The restore command used to not print errors while downloading file contents from the repository. It also incorrectly exited with a zero error code even when there were errors during the restore process. This has all been fixed and restore now returns with a non-zero exit code when there's an error.

restic#3166 restic#3207
Bugfix #3232: Correct statistics for overlapping targets

A user reported that restic's statistics and progress information during backup was not correctly calculated when the backup targets (files/dirs to save) overlap. For example, consider a directory foo which contains (among others) a file foo/bar. When restic backup foo foo/bar was run, restic counted the size of the file foo/bar twice, so the completeness percentage as well as the number of files was wrong. This is now corrected.

restic#3232 restic#3243
Bugfix #3249: Improve error handling in gs backend

The gs backend did not notice when the last step of completing a file upload failed. Under rare circumstances, this could cause missing files in the backup repository. This has now been fixed.

restic#3249
Change #3095: Deleting files on Google Drive now moves them to the trash

When deleting files on Google Drive via the rclone backend, restic used to bypass the trash folder required that one used the -o rclone.args option to enable usage of the trash folder. This ensured that deleted files in Google Drive were not kept indefinitely in the trash folder. However, since Google Drive's trash retention policy changed to deleting trashed files after 30 days, this is no longer needed.

Restic now leaves it up to rclone and its configuration to use or not use the trash folder when deleting files. The default is to use the trash folder, as of rclone 1.53.2. To re-enable the restic 0.11 behavior, set the RCLONE_DRIVE_USE_TRASH environment variable or change the rclone configuration. See the rclone documentation for more details.

restic#3095 restic#3102
Enhancement #909: Back up mountpoints as empty directories

When the --one-file-system option is specified to restic backup, it ignores all file systems mounted below one of the target directories. This means that when a snapshot is restored, users needed to manually recreate the mountpoint directories.

Restic now backs up mountpoints as empty directories and therefore implements the same approach as tar.

restic#909 restic#3119
Enhancement #2186: Allow specifying percentage in check --read-data-subset

We've enhanced the check command's --read-data-subset option to also accept a percentage (e.g. 2.5% or 10%). This will check the given percentage of pack files (which are randomly selected on each run).

restic#2186 restic#3038
Enhancement #2433: Make the dump command support zip format

Previously, restic could dump the contents of a whole folder structure only in the tar format. The dump command now has a new flag to change output format to zip. Just pass --archive zip as an option to restic dump.

restic#2433 restic#3081
Enhancement #2453: Report permanent/fatal backend errors earlier

When encountering errors in reading from or writing to storage backends, restic retries the failing operation up to nine times (for a total of ten attempts). It used to retry all backend operations, but now detects some permanent error conditions so that it can report fatal errors earlier.

Permanent failures include local disks being full, SSH connections dropping and permission errors.

restic#2453 restic#3180 restic#3170 restic#3181
Enhancement #2495: Add option to let backup trust mtime without checking ctime

The backup command used to require that both ctime and mtime of a file matched with a previously backed up version to determine that the file was unchanged. In other words, if either ctime or mtime of the file had changed, it would be considered changed and restic would read the file's content again to back up the relevant (changed) parts of it.

The new option --ignore-ctime makes restic look at mtime only, such that ctime changes for a file does not cause restic to read the file's contents again.

The check for both ctime and mtime was introduced in restic 0.9.6 to make backups more reliable in the face of programs that reset mtime (some Unix archivers do that), but it turned out to often be expensive because it made restic read file contents even if only the metadata (owner, permissions) of a file had changed. The new --ignore-ctime option lets the user restore the 0.9.5 behavior when needed. The existing --ignore-inode option already turned off this behavior, but also removed a different check.

Please note that changes in files' metadata are still recorded, regardless of the command line options provided to the backup command.

restic#2495 restic#2558 restic#2819 restic#2823
Enhancement #2528: Add Alibaba/Aliyun OSS support in the s3 backend

A new extended option s3.bucket-lookup has been added to support Alibaba/Aliyun OSS in the s3 backend. The option can be set to one of the following values:
- auto - Existing behaviour - dns - Use DNS style bucket access - path - Use path style bucket access
To make the s3 backend work with Alibaba/Aliyun OSS you must set s3.bucket-lookup to dns and set the s3.region parameter. For example:

Restic -o s3.bucket-lookup=dns -o s3.region=oss-eu-west-1 -r s3:https://oss-eu-west-1.aliyuncs.com/bucketname init

Note that s3.region must be set, otherwise the MinIO SDK tries to look it up and it seems that Alibaba doesn't support that properly.

restic#2528 restic#2535
Enhancement #2706: Configurable progress reports for non-interactive terminals

The backup, check and prune commands never printed any progress reports on non-interactive terminals. This behavior is now configurable using the RESTIC_PROGRESS_FPS environment variable. Use for example a value of 1 for an update every second, or 0.01666 for an update every minute.

The backup command now also prints the current progress when restic receives a SIGUSR1 signal.

Setting the RESTIC_PROGRESS_FPS environment variable or sending a SIGUSR1 signal prints a status report even when --quiet was specified.

restic#2706 restic#3194 restic#3199
Enhancement #2718: Improve prune performance and make it more customizable

The prune command is now much faster. This is especially the case for remote repositories or repositories with not much data to remove. Also the memory usage of the prune command is now reduced.

Restic used to rebuild the index from scratch after pruning. This could lead to missing packs in the index in some cases for eventually consistent backends such as e.g. AWS S3. This behavior is now changed and the index rebuilding uses the information already known by prune.

By default, the prune command no longer removes all unused data. This behavior can be fine-tuned by new options, like the acceptable amount of unused space or the maximum size of data to reorganize. For more details, please see https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html .

Moreover, prune now accepts the --dry-run option and also running forget --dry-run --prune will show what prune would do.

This enhancement also fixes several open issues, e.g.: - restic#1140 - restic#1599 - restic#1985 - restic#2112 - restic#2227 - restic#2305

restic#2718 restic#2842
Enhancement #2941: Speed up the repacking step of the prune command

The repack step of the prune command, which moves still used file parts into new pack files such that the old ones can be garbage collected later on, now processes multiple pack files in parallel. This is especially beneficial for high latency backends or when using a fast network connection.

restic#2941
Enhancement #2944: Add backup options --files-from-{verbatim,raw}

The new backup options --files-from-verbatim and --files-from-raw read a list of files to back up from a file. Unlike the existing --files-from option, these options do not interpret the listed filenames as glob patterns; instead, whitespace in filenames is preserved as-is and no pattern expansion is done. Please see the documentation for specifics.

These new options are highly recommended over --files-from, when using a script to generate the list of files to back up.

restic#2944 restic#3013
Enhancement #3006: Speed up the rebuild-index command

We've optimized the rebuild-index command. Now, existing index entries are used to minimize the number of pack files that must be read. This speeds up the index rebuild a lot.

Additionally, the option --read-all-packs has been added, implementing the previous behavior.

restic#3006 https://github.com/restic/restic/issue/2547
Enhancement #3048: Add more checks for index and pack files in the check command

The check command run with the --read-data or --read-data-subset options used to only verify only the pack file content - it did not check if the blobs within the pack are correctly contained in the index.

A check for the latter is now in place, which can print the following error:

Blob ID is not contained in index or position is incorrect

Another test is also added, which compares pack file sizes computed from the index and the pack header with the actual file size. This test is able to detect truncated pack files.

If the index is not correct, it can be rebuilt by using the rebuild-index command.

Having added these tests, restic check is now able to detect non-existing blobs which are wrongly referenced in the index. This situation could have lead to missing data.

restic#3048 restic#3082
Enhancement #3083: Allow usage of deprecated S3 ListObjects API

Some S3 API implementations, e.g. Ceph before version 14.2.5, have a broken ListObjectsV2 implementation which causes problems for restic when using their API endpoints. When a broken server implementation is used, restic prints errors similar to the following:

List() returned error: Truncated response should have continuation token set

As a temporary workaround, restic now allows using the older ListObjects endpoint by setting the s3.list-objects-v1 extended option, for instance:

Restic -o s3.list-objects-v1=true snapshots

Please note that this option may be removed in future versions of restic.

restic#3083 restic#3085
Enhancement #3099: Reduce memory usage of check command

The check command now requires less memory if it is run without the --check-unused option.

restic#3099
Enhancement #3106: Parallelize scan of snapshot content in copy and prune

The copy and prune commands used to traverse the directories of snapshots one by one to find used data. This snapshot traversal is now parallized which can speed up this step several times.

In addition the check command now reports how many snapshots have already been processed.

restic#3106
Enhancement #3130: Parallelize reading of locks and snapshots

Restic used to read snapshots sequentially. For repositories containing many snapshots this slowed down commands which have to read all snapshots.

Now the reading of snapshots is parallelized. This speeds up for example prune, backup and other commands that search for snapshots with certain properties or which have to find the latest snapshot.

The speed up also applies to locks stored in the backup repository.

restic#3130 restic#3174
Enhancement #3147: Support additional environment variables for Swift authentication

The swift backend now supports the following additional environment variables for passing authentication details to restic: OS_USER_ID, OS_USER_DOMAIN_ID, OS_PROJECT_DOMAIN_ID and OS_TRUST_ID

Depending on the openrc configuration file these might be required when the user and project domains differ from one another.

restic#3147 restic#3158
Enhancement #3191: Add release binaries for MIPS architectures

We've added a few new architectures for Linux to the release binaries: mips, mipsle, mips64, and mip64le. MIPS is mostly used for low-end embedded systems.

restic#3191 restic#3208
Enhancement #3250: Add several more error checks

We've added a lot more error checks in places where errors were previously ignored (as hinted by the static analysis program errcheck via golangci-lint).

restic#3250
Enhancement #3254: Enable HTTP/2 for backend connections

Go's HTTP library usually automatically chooses between HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 depending on what the server supports. But for compatibility this mechanism is disabled if DialContext is used (which is the case for restic). This change allows restic's HTTP client to negotiate HTTP/2 if supported by the server.

restic#3254

Changelog for restic 0.11.0 (2020-11-05)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.11.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1212: Restore timestamps and permissions on intermediate directories
Fix #1756: Mark repository files as read-only when using the local backend
Fix #2241: Hide password in REST backend repository URLs
Fix #2319: Correctly dump directories into tar files
Fix #2491: Don't require self-update --output placeholder file
Fix #2834: Fix rare cases of backup command hanging forever
Fix #2938: Fix manpage formatting
Fix #2942: Make --exclude-larger-than handle disappearing files
Fix #2951: Restic generate, help and self-update no longer check passwords
Fix #2979: Make snapshots --json output [] instead of null when no snapshots
Enh #340: Add support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows
Enh #1458: New option --repository-file
Enh #2849: Authenticate to Google Cloud Storage with access token
Enh #2969: Optimize check for unchanged files during backup
Enh #2978: Warn if parent snapshot cannot be loaded during backup

Details

Bugfix #1212: Restore timestamps and permissions on intermediate directories

When using the --include option of the restore command, restic restored timestamps and permissions only on directories selected by the include pattern. Intermediate directories, which are necessary to restore files located in sub- directories, were created with default permissions. We've fixed the restore command to restore timestamps and permissions for these directories as well.

restic#1212 restic#1402 restic#2906
Bugfix #1756: Mark repository files as read-only when using the local backend

Files stored in a local repository were marked as writeable on the filesystem for non-Windows systems, which did not prevent accidental file modifications outside of restic. In addition, the local backend did not work with certain filesystems and network mounts which do not permit modifications of file permissions.

Restic now marks files stored in a local repository as read-only on the filesystem on non-Windows systems. The error handling is improved to support more filesystems.

restic#1756 restic#2157 restic#2989
Bugfix #2241: Hide password in REST backend repository URLs

When using a password in the REST backend repository URL, the password could in some cases be included in the output from restic, e.g. when initializing a repo or during an error.

The password is now replaced with "***" where applicable.

restic#2241 restic#2658
Bugfix #2319: Correctly dump directories into tar files

The dump command previously wrote directories in a tar file in a way which can cause compatibility problems. This caused, for example, 7zip on Windows to not open tar files containing directories. In addition it was not possible to dump directories with extended attributes. These compatibility problems are now corrected.

In addition, a tar file now includes the name of the owner and group of a file.

restic#2319 restic#3039
Bugfix #2491: Don't require self-update --output placeholder file

restic self-update --output /path/to/new-restic used to require that new-restic was an existing file, to be overwritten. Now it's possible to download an updated restic binary to a new path, without first having to create a placeholder file.

restic#2491 restic#2937
Bugfix #2834: Fix rare cases of backup command hanging forever

We've fixed an issue with the backup progress reporting which could cause restic to hang forever right before finishing a backup.

restic#2834 restic#2963
Bugfix #2938: Fix manpage formatting

The manpage formatting in restic v0.10.0 was garbled, which is fixed now.

restic#2938 restic#2977
Bugfix #2942: Make --exclude-larger-than handle disappearing files

There was a small bug in the backup command's --exclude-larger-than option where files that disappeared between scanning and actually backing them up to the repository caused a panic. This is now fixed.

restic#2942
Bugfix #2951: Restic generate, help and self-update no longer check passwords

The commands restic cache, generate, help and self-update don't need passwords, but they previously did run the RESTIC_PASSWORD_COMMAND (if set in the environment), prompting users to authenticate for no reason. They now skip running the password command.

restic#2951 restic#2987
Bugfix #2979: Make snapshots --json output [] instead of null when no snapshots

Restic previously output null instead of [] for the --json snapshots command, when there were no snapshots in the repository. This caused some minor problems when parsing the output, but is now fixed such that [] is output when the list of snapshots is empty.

restic#2979 restic#2984
Enhancement #340: Add support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows

Volume Shadow Copy Service allows read access to files that are locked by another process using an exclusive lock through a filesystem snapshot. Restic was unable to backup those files before. This update enables backing up these files.

This needs to be enabled explicitely using the --use-fs-snapshot option of the backup command.

restic#340 restic#2274
Enhancement #1458: New option --repository-file

We've added a new command-line option --repository-file as an alternative to -r. This allows to read the repository URL from a file in order to prevent certain types of information leaks, especially for URLs containing credentials.

restic#1458 restic#2900 restic#2910
Enhancement #2849: Authenticate to Google Cloud Storage with access token

When using the GCS backend, it is now possible to authenticate with OAuth2 access tokens instead of a credentials file by setting the GOOGLE_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable.

restic#2849
Enhancement #2969: Optimize check for unchanged files during backup

During a backup restic skips processing files which have not changed since the last backup run. Previously this required opening each file once which can be slow on network filesystems. The backup command now checks for file changes before opening a file. This considerably reduces the time to create a backup on network filesystems.

restic#2969 restic#2970
Enhancement #2978: Warn if parent snapshot cannot be loaded during backup

During a backup restic uses the parent snapshot to check whether a file was changed and has to be backed up again. For this check the backup has to read the directories contained in the old snapshot. If a tree blob cannot be loaded, restic now warns about this problem with the backup repository.

restic#2978

Changelog for restic 0.10.0 (2020-09-19)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.10.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1863: Report correct number of directories processed by backup
Fix #2254: Fix tar issues when dumping /
Fix #2281: Handle format verbs like '%' properly in find output
Fix #2298: Do not hang when run as a background job
Fix #2389: Fix mangled json output of backup command
Fix #2390: Refresh lock timestamp
Fix #2429: Backup --json reports total_bytes_processed as 0
Fix #2469: Fix incorrect bytes stats in diff command
Fix #2518: Do not crash with Synology NAS sftp server
Fix #2531: Fix incorrect size calculation in stats --mode restore-size
Fix #2537: Fix incorrect file counts in stats --mode restore-size
Fix #2592: SFTP backend supports IPv6 addresses
Fix #2607: Honor RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable on Mac and Windows
Fix #2668: Don't abort the stats command when data blobs are missing
Fix #2674: Add stricter prune error checks
Fix #2899: Fix possible crash in the progress bar of check --read-data
Chg #1597: Honor the --no-lock flag in the mount command
Chg #2482: Remove vendored dependencies
Chg #2546: Return exit code 3 when failing to backup all source data
Chg #2600: Update dependencies, require Go >= 1.13
Enh #323: Add command for copying snapshots between repositories
Enh #551: Use optimized library for hash calculation of file chunks
Enh #1570: Support specifying multiple host flags for various commands
Enh #1680: Optimize restic mount
Enh #2072: Display snapshot date when using restic find
Enh #2175: Allow specifying user and host when creating keys
Enh #2195: Simplify and improve restore performance
Enh #2277: Add support for ppc64le
Enh #2328: Improve speed of check command
Enh #2395: Ignore sync errors when operation not supported by local filesystem
Enh #2423: Support user@domain parsing as user
Enh #2427: Add flag --iexclude-file to backup command
Enh #2569: Support excluding files by their size
Enh #2571: Self-heal missing file parts during backup of unchanged files
Enh #2576: Improve the chunking algorithm
Enh #2598: Improve speed of diff command
Enh #2599: Slightly reduce memory usage of prune and stats commands
Enh #2733: S3 backend: Add support for WebIdentityTokenFile
Enh #2773: Optimize handling of new index entries
Enh #2781: Reduce memory consumption of in-memory index
Enh #2786: Optimize list blobs command
Enh #2790: Optimized file access in restic mount
Enh #2840: Speed-up file deletion in forget, prune and rebuild-index
Enh #2858: Support filtering snapshots by tag and path in the stats command

Details

Bugfix #1863: Report correct number of directories processed by backup

The directory statistics calculation was fixed to report the actual number of processed directories instead of always zero.

restic#1863
Bugfix #2254: Fix tar issues when dumping /

We've fixed an issue with dumping either / or files on the first sublevel e.g. /foo to tar. This also fixes tar dumping issues on Windows where this issue could also happen.

restic#2254 restic#2357 restic#2255
Bugfix #2281: Handle format verbs like '%' properly in find output

The JSON or "normal" output of the find command can now deal with file names that contain substrings which the Golang fmt package considers "format verbs" like %s.

restic#2281
Bugfix #2298: Do not hang when run as a background job

Restic did hang on exit while restoring the terminal configuration when it was started as a background job, for example using restic ... &. This has been fixed by only restoring the terminal configuration when restic is interrupted while reading a password from the terminal.

restic#2298
Bugfix #2389: Fix mangled json output of backup command

We've fixed a race condition in the json output of the backup command that could cause multiple lines to get mixed up. We've also ensured that the backup summary is printed last.

restic#2389 restic#2545
Bugfix #2390: Refresh lock timestamp

Long-running operations did not refresh lock timestamp, resulting in locks becoming stale. This is now fixed.

restic#2390
Bugfix #2429: Backup --json reports total_bytes_processed as 0

We've fixed the json output of total_bytes_processed. The non-json output was already fixed with pull request #2138 but left the json output untouched.

restic#2429
Bugfix #2469: Fix incorrect bytes stats in diff command

In some cases, the wrong number of bytes (e.g. 16777215.998 TiB) were reported by the diff command. This is now fixed.

restic#2469
Bugfix #2518: Do not crash with Synology NAS sftp server

It was found that when restic is used to store data on an sftp server on a Synology NAS with a relative path (one which does not start with a slash), it may go into an endless loop trying to create directories on the server. We've fixed this bug by using a function in the sftp library instead of our own implementation.

The bug was discovered because the Synology sftp server behaves erratic with non-absolute path (e.g. home/restic-repo). This can be resolved by just using an absolute path instead (/home/restic-repo). We've also added a paragraph in the FAQ.

restic#2518 restic#2363 restic#2530
Bugfix #2531: Fix incorrect size calculation in stats --mode restore-size

The restore-size mode of stats was counting hard-linked files as if they were independent.

restic#2531
Bugfix #2537: Fix incorrect file counts in stats --mode restore-size

The restore-size mode of stats was failing to count empty directories and some files with hard links.

restic#2537
Bugfix #2592: SFTP backend supports IPv6 addresses

The SFTP backend now supports IPv6 addresses natively, without relying on aliases in the external SSH configuration.

restic#2592
Bugfix #2607: Honor RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable on Mac and Windows

On Mac and Windows, the RESTIC_CACHE_DIR environment variable was ignored. This variable can now be used on all platforms to set the directory where restic stores caches.

restic#2607
Bugfix #2668: Don't abort the stats command when data blobs are missing

Runing the stats command in the blobs-per-file mode on a repository with missing data blobs previously resulted in a crash.

restic#2668
Bugfix #2674: Add stricter prune error checks

Additional checks were added to the prune command in order to improve resiliency to backend, hardware and/or networking issues. The checks now detect a few more cases where such outside factors could potentially cause data loss.

restic#2674
Bugfix #2899: Fix possible crash in the progress bar of check --read-data

We've fixed a possible crash while displaying the progress bar for the check --read-data command. The crash occurred when the length of the progress bar status exceeded the terminal width, which only happened for very narrow terminal windows.

restic#2899 https://forum.restic.net/t/restic-rclone-pcloud-connection-issues/2963/15
Change #1597: Honor the --no-lock flag in the mount command

The mount command now does not lock the repository if given the --no-lock flag. This allows to mount repositories which are archived on a read only backend/filesystem.

restic#1597 restic#2821
Change #2482: Remove vendored dependencies

We've removed the vendored dependencies (in the subdir vendor/). When building restic, the Go compiler automatically fetches the dependencies. It will also cryptographically verify that the correct code has been fetched by using the hashes in go.sum (see the link to the documentation below).

restic#2482 https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Module_downloading_and_verification
Change #2546: Return exit code 3 when failing to backup all source data

The backup command used to return a zero exit code as long as a snapshot could be created successfully, even if some of the source files could not be read (in which case the snapshot would contain the rest of the files).

This made it hard for automation/scripts to detect failures/incomplete backups by looking at the exit code. Restic now returns the following exit codes for the backup command:
- 0 when the command was successful - 1 when there was a fatal error (no snapshot created) - 3 when some source data could not be read (incomplete snapshot created)
restic#956 restic#2064 restic#2526 restic#2364 restic#2546
Change #2600: Update dependencies, require Go >= 1.13

Restic now requires Go to be at least 1.13. This allows simplifications in the build process and removing workarounds.

This is also probably the last version of restic still supporting mounting repositories via fuse on macOS. The library we're using for fuse does not support macOS any more and osxfuse is not open source any more.

bazil/fuse#224 macfuse/macfuse#590 restic#2600 restic#2852 restic#2927
Enhancement #323: Add command for copying snapshots between repositories

We've added a copy command, allowing you to copy snapshots from one repository to another.

Note that this process will have to read (download) and write (upload) the entire snapshot(s) due to the different encryption keys used on the source and destination repository. Also, the transferred files are not re-chunked, which may break deduplication between files already stored in the destination repo and files copied there using this command.

To fully support deduplication between repositories when the copy command is used, the init command now supports the --copy-chunker-params option, which initializes the new repository with identical parameters for splitting files into chunks as an already existing repository. This allows copied snapshots to be equally deduplicated in both repositories.

restic#323 restic#2606 restic#2928
Enhancement #551: Use optimized library for hash calculation of file chunks

We've switched the library used to calculate the hashes of file chunks, which are used for deduplication, to the optimized Minio SHA-256 implementation.

Depending on the CPU it improves the hashing throughput by 10-30%. Modern x86 CPUs with the SHA Extension should be about two to three times faster.

restic#551 restic#2709
Enhancement #1570: Support specifying multiple host flags for various commands

Previously commands didn't take more than one --host or -H argument into account, which could be limiting with e.g. the forget command.

The dump, find, forget, ls, mount, restore, snapshots, stats and tag commands will now take into account multiple --host and -H flags.

restic#1570
Enhancement #1680: Optimize restic mount

We've optimized the FUSE implementation used within restic. restic mount is now more responsive and uses less memory.

restic#1680 restic#2587 restic#2787
Enhancement #2072: Display snapshot date when using restic find

Added the respective snapshot date to the output of restic find.

restic#2072
Enhancement #2175: Allow specifying user and host when creating keys

When adding a new key to the repository, the username and hostname for the new key can be specified on the command line. This allows overriding the defaults, for example if you would prefer to use the FQDN to identify the host or if you want to add keys for several different hosts without having to run the key add command on those hosts.

restic#2175
Enhancement #2195: Simplify and improve restore performance

Significantly improves restore performance of large files (i.e. 50M+): restic#2074 https://forum.restic.net/t/restore-using-rclone-gdrive-backend-is-slow/1112/8 https://forum.restic.net/t/degraded-restore-performance-s3-backend/1400

Fixes "not enough cache capacity" error during restore: restic#2244

NOTE: This new implementation does not guarantee order in which blobs are written to the target files and, for example, the last blob of a file can be written to the file before any of the preceeding file blobs. It is therefore possible to have gaps in the data written to the target files if restore fails or interrupted by the user.

The implementation will try to preallocate space for the restored files on the filesystem to prevent file fragmentation. This ensures good read performance for large files, like for example VM images. If preallocating space is not supported by the filesystem, then this step is silently skipped.

restic#2195 restic#2893
Enhancement #2277: Add support for ppc64le

Adds support for ppc64le, the processor architecture from IBM.

restic#2277
Enhancement #2328: Improve speed of check command

We've improved the check command to traverse trees only once independent of whether they are contained in multiple snapshots. The check command is now much faster for repositories with a large number of snapshots.

restic#2284 restic#2328
Enhancement #2395: Ignore sync errors when operation not supported by local filesystem

The local backend has been modified to work with filesystems which doesn't support the sync operation. This operation is normally used by restic to ensure that data files are fully written to disk before continuing.

For these limited filesystems, saving a file in the backend would previously fail with an "operation not supported" error. This error is now ignored, which means that e.g. an SMB mount on macOS can now be used as storage location for a repository.

restic#2395 https://forum.restic.net/t/sync-errors-on-mac-over-smb/1859
Enhancement #2423: Support user@domain parsing as user

Added the ability for user@domain-like users to be authenticated over SFTP servers.

restic#2423
Enhancement #2427: Add flag --iexclude-file to backup command

The backup command now supports the flag --iexclude-file which is a case-insensitive version of --exclude-file.

restic#2427 restic#2898
Enhancement #2569: Support excluding files by their size

The backup command now supports the --exclude-larger-than option to exclude files which are larger than the specified maximum size. This can for example be useful to exclude unimportant files with a large file size.

restic#2569 restic#2914
Enhancement #2571: Self-heal missing file parts during backup of unchanged files

We've improved the resilience of restic to certain types of repository corruption.

For files that are unchanged since the parent snapshot, the backup command now verifies that all parts of the files still exist in the repository. Parts that are missing, e.g. from a damaged repository, are backed up again. This verification was already run for files that were modified since the parent snapshot, but is now also done for unchanged files.

Note that restic will not backup file parts that are referenced in the index but where the actual data is not present on disk, as this situation can only be detected by restic check. Please ensure that you run restic check regularly.

restic#2571 restic#2827
Enhancement #2576: Improve the chunking algorithm

We've updated the chunker library responsible for splitting files into smaller blocks. It should improve the chunking throughput by 5-15% depending on the CPU.

restic#2820 restic#2576 restic#2845
Enhancement #2598: Improve speed of diff command

We've improved the performance of the diff command when comparing snapshots with similar content. It should run up to twice as fast as before.

restic#2598
Enhancement #2599: Slightly reduce memory usage of prune and stats commands

The prune and the stats command kept directory identifiers in memory twice while searching for used blobs.

restic#2599
Enhancement #2733: S3 backend: Add support for WebIdentityTokenFile

We've added support for EKS IAM roles for service accounts feature to the S3 backend.

restic#2703 restic#2733
Enhancement #2773: Optimize handling of new index entries

Restic now uses less memory for backups which add a lot of data, e.g. large initial backups. In addition, we've improved the stability in some edge cases.

restic#2773
Enhancement #2781: Reduce memory consumption of in-memory index

We've improved how the index is stored in memory. This change can reduce memory usage for large repositories by up to 50% (depending on the operation).

restic#2781 restic#2812
Enhancement #2786: Optimize list blobs command

We've changed the implementation of list blobs which should be now a bit faster and consume almost no memory even for large repositories.

restic#2786
Enhancement #2790: Optimized file access in restic mount

Reading large (> 100GiB) files from restic mountpoints is now faster, and the speedup is greater for larger files.

restic#2790
Enhancement #2840: Speed-up file deletion in forget, prune and rebuild-index

We've sped up the file deletion for the commands forget, prune and rebuild-index, especially for remote repositories. Deletion was sequential before and is now run in parallel.

restic#2840
Enhancement #2858: Support filtering snapshots by tag and path in the stats command

We've added filtering snapshots by --tag tagList and by --path path to the stats command. This includes filtering of only 'latest' snapshots or all snapshots in a repository.

restic#2858 restic#2859 https://forum.restic.net/t/stats-for-a-host-and-filtered-snapshots/3020

Changelog for restic 0.9.6 (2019-11-22)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.6 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #2063: Allow absolute path for filename when backing up from stdin
Fix #2174: Save files with invalid timestamps
Fix #2249: Read fresh metadata for unmodified files
Fix #2301: Add upper bound for t in --read-data-subset=n/t
Fix #2321: Check errors when loading index files
Enh #2179: Use ctime when checking for file changes
Enh #2306: Allow multiple retries for interactive password input
Enh #2330: Make --group-by accept both singular and plural
Enh #2350: Add option to configure S3 region

Details

Bugfix #2063: Allow absolute path for filename when backing up from stdin

When backing up from stdin, handle directory path for --stdin-filename. This can be used to specify the full path for the backed-up file.

restic#2063
Bugfix #2174: Save files with invalid timestamps

When restic reads invalid timestamps (year is before 0000 or after 9999) it refused to read and archive the file. We've changed the behavior and will now save modified timestamps with the year set to either 0000 or 9999, the rest of the timestamp stays the same, so the file will be saved (albeit with a bogus timestamp).

restic#2174 restic#1173
Bugfix #2249: Read fresh metadata for unmodified files

Restic took all metadata for files which were detected as unmodified, not taking into account changed metadata (ownership, mode). This is now corrected.

restic#2249 restic#2252
Bugfix #2301: Add upper bound for t in --read-data-subset=n/t

256 is the effective maximum for t, but restic would allow larger values, leading to strange behavior.

restic#2301 restic#2304
Bugfix #2321: Check errors when loading index files

Restic now checks and handles errors which occur when loading index files, the missing check leads to odd errors (and a stack trace printed to users) later. This was reported in the forum.

restic#2321 https://forum.restic.net/t/check-rebuild-index-prune/1848/13
Enhancement #2179: Use ctime when checking for file changes

Previously, restic only checked a file's mtime (along with other non-timestamp metadata) to decide if a file has changed. This could cause restic to not notice that a file has changed (and therefore continue to store the old version, as opposed to the modified version) if something edits the file and then resets the timestamp. Restic now also checks the ctime of files, so any modifications to a file should be noticed, and the modified file will be backed up. The ctime check will be disabled if the --ignore-inode flag was given.

If this change causes problems for you, please open an issue, and we can look in to adding a seperate flag to disable just the ctime check.

restic#2179 restic#2212
Enhancement #2306: Allow multiple retries for interactive password input

Restic used to quit if the repository password was typed incorrectly once. Restic will now ask the user again for the repository password if typed incorrectly. The user will now get three tries to input the correct password before restic quits.

restic#2306
Enhancement #2330: Make --group-by accept both singular and plural

One can now use the values host/hosts, path/paths and tag / tags interchangeably in the --group-by argument.

restic#2330
Enhancement #2350: Add option to configure S3 region

We've added a new option for setting the region when accessing an S3-compatible service. For some providers, it is required to set this to a valid value. You can do that either by setting the environment variable AWS_DEFAULT_REGION or using the option s3.region, e.g. like this: -o s3.region="us-east-1".

restic#2350

Changelog for restic 0.9.5 (2019-04-23)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.5 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #2135: Return error when no bytes could be read from stdin
Fix #2181: Don't cancel timeout after 30 seconds for self-update
Fix #2203: Fix reading passwords from stdin
Fix #2224: Don't abort the find command when a tree can't be loaded
Enh #1895: Add case insensitive include & exclude options
Enh #1937: Support streaming JSON output for backup
Enh #2037: Add group-by option to snapshots command
Enh #2124: Ability to dump folders to tar via stdout
Enh #2139: Return error if no bytes could be read for backup --stdin
Enh #2155: Add Openstack application credential auth for Swift
Enh #2184: Add --json support to forget command
Enh #2205: Add --ignore-inode option to backup cmd
Enh #2220: Add config option to set S3 storage class

Details

Bugfix #2135: Return error when no bytes could be read from stdin

We assume that users reading backup data from stdin want to know when no data could be read, so now restic returns an error when backup --stdin is called but no bytes could be read. Usually, this means that an earlier command in a pipe has failed. The documentation was amended and now recommends setting the pipefail option (set -o pipefail).

restic#2135 restic#2139
Bugfix #2181: Don't cancel timeout after 30 seconds for self-update

restic#2181
Bugfix #2203: Fix reading passwords from stdin

Passwords for the init, key add, and key passwd commands can now be read from non-terminal stdin.

restic#2203
Bugfix #2224: Don't abort the find command when a tree can't be loaded

Change the find command so that missing trees don't result in a crash. Instead, the error is logged to the debug log, and the tree ID is displayed along with the snapshot it belongs to. This makes it possible to recover repositories that are missing trees by forgetting the snapshots they are used in.

restic#2224
Enhancement #1895: Add case insensitive include & exclude options

The backup and restore commands now have --iexclude and --iinclude flags as case insensitive variants of --exclude and --include.

restic#1895 restic#2032
Enhancement #1937: Support streaming JSON output for backup

We've added support for getting machine-readable status output during backup, just pass the flag --json for restic backup and restic will output a stream of JSON objects which contain the current progress.

restic#1937 restic#1944
Enhancement #2037: Add group-by option to snapshots command

We have added an option to group the output of the snapshots command, similar to the output of the forget command. The option has been called "--group-by" and accepts any combination of the values "host", "paths" and "tags", separated by commas. Default behavior (not specifying --group-by) has not been changed. We have added support of the grouping to the JSON output.

restic#2037 restic#2087
Enhancement #2124: Ability to dump folders to tar via stdout

We've added the ability to dump whole folders to stdout via the dump command. Restic now requires at least Go 1.10 due to a limitation of the standard library for Go <= 1.9.

restic#2123 restic#2124
Enhancement #2139: Return error if no bytes could be read for backup --stdin

When restic is used to backup the output of a program, like mysqldump | restic backup --stdin, it now returns an error if no bytes could be read at all. This catches the failure case when mysqldump failed for some reason and did not output any data to stdout.

restic#2139
Enhancement #2155: Add Openstack application credential auth for Swift

Since Openstack Queens Identity (auth V3) service supports an application credential auth method. It allows to create a technical account with the limited roles. This commit adds an application credential authentication method for the Swift backend.

restic#2155
Enhancement #2184: Add --json support to forget command

The forget command now supports the --json argument, outputting the information about what is (or would-be) kept and removed from the repository.

restic#2184 restic#2185
Enhancement #2205: Add --ignore-inode option to backup cmd

This option handles backup of virtual filesystems that do not keep fixed inodes for files, like Fuse-based, pCloud, etc. Ignoring inode changes allows to consider the file as unchanged if last modification date and size are unchanged.

restic#1631 restic#2205 restic#2047
Enhancement #2220: Add config option to set S3 storage class

The s3.storage-class option can be passed to restic (using -o) to specify the storage class to be used for S3 objects created by restic.

The storage class is passed as-is to S3, so it needs to be understood by the API. On AWS, it can be one of STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, ONEZONE_IA, INTELLIGENT_TIERING and REDUCED_REDUNDANCY. If unspecified, the default storage class is used (STANDARD on AWS).

You can mix storage classes in the same bucket, and the setting isn't stored in the restic repository, so be sure to specify it with each command that writes to S3.

restic#706 restic#2220

Changelog for restic 0.9.4 (2019-01-06)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.4 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1989: Google Cloud Storage: Respect bandwidth limit
Fix #2040: Add host name filter shorthand flag for stats command
Fix #2068: Correctly return error loading data
Fix #2095: Consistently use local time for snapshots times
Enh #1605: Concurrent restore
Enh #2017: Mount: Enforce FUSE Unix permissions with allow-other
Enh #2070: Make all commands display timestamps in local time
Enh #2085: Allow --files-from to be specified multiple times
Enh #2089: Increase granularity of the "keep within" retention policy
Enh #2094: Run command to get password
Enh #2097: Add key hinting

Details

Bugfix #1989: Google Cloud Storage: Respect bandwidth limit

The GCS backend did not respect the bandwidth limit configured, a previous commit accidentally removed support for it.

restic#1989 restic#2100
Bugfix #2040: Add host name filter shorthand flag for stats command

The default value for --host flag was set to 'H' (the shorthand version of the flag), this caused the lookup for the latest snapshot to fail.

Add shorthand flag -H for --host (with empty default so if these flags are not specified the latest snapshot will not filter by host name).

Also add shorthand -H for backup command.

restic#2040
Bugfix #2068: Correctly return error loading data

In one case during prune and check, an error loading data from the backend is not returned properly. This is now corrected.

restic#1999 (comment) restic#2068
Bugfix #2095: Consistently use local time for snapshots times

By default snapshots created with restic backup were set to local time, but when the --time flag was used the provided timestamp was parsed as UTC. With this change all snapshots times are set to local time.

restic#2095
Enhancement #1605: Concurrent restore

This change significantly improves restore performance, especially when using high-latency remote repositories like B2.

The implementation now uses several concurrent threads to download and process multiple remote files concurrently. To further reduce restore time, each remote file is downloaded using a single repository request.

restic#1605 restic#1719
Enhancement #2017: Mount: Enforce FUSE Unix permissions with allow-other

The fuse mount (restic mount) now lets the kernel check the permissions of the files within snapshots (this is done through the DefaultPermissions FUSE option) when the option --allow-other is specified.

To restore the old behavior, we've added the --no-default-permissions option. This allows all users that have access to the mount point to access all files within the snapshots.

restic#2017
Enhancement #2070: Make all commands display timestamps in local time

Restic used to drop the timezone information from displayed timestamps, it now converts timestamps to local time before printing them so the times can be easily compared to.

restic#2070
Enhancement #2085: Allow --files-from to be specified multiple times

Before, restic took only the last file specified with --files-from into account, this is now corrected.

restic#2085 restic#2086
Enhancement #2089: Increase granularity of the "keep within" retention policy

The keep-within option of the forget command now accepts time ranges with an hourly granularity. For example, running restic forget --keep-within 3d12h will keep all the snapshots made within three days and twelve hours from the time of the latest snapshot.

restic#2089 restic#2090
Enhancement #2094: Run command to get password

We've added the --password-command option which allows specifying a command that restic runs every time the password for the repository is needed, so it can be integrated with a password manager or keyring. The option can also be set via the environment variable $RESTIC_PASSWORD_COMMAND.

restic#2094
Enhancement #2097: Add key hinting

Added a new option --key-hint and corresponding environment variable RESTIC_KEY_HINT. The key hint is a key ID to try decrypting first, before other keys in the repository.

This change will benefit repositories with many keys; if the correct key hint is supplied then restic only needs to check one key. If the key hint is incorrect (the key does not exist, or the password is incorrect) then restic will check all keys, as usual.

restic#2097

Changelog for restic 0.9.3 (2018-10-13)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.3 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1935: Remove truncated files from cache
Fix #1978: Do not return an error when the scanner is slower than backup
Enh #1766: Restore: suppress lchown errors when not running as root
Enh #1777: Improve the find command
Enh #1876: Display reason why forget keeps snapshots
Enh #1891: Accept glob in paths loaded via --files-from
Enh #1909: Reject files/dirs by name first
Enh #1920: Vendor dependencies with Go 1.11 Modules
Enh #1940: Add directory filter to ls command
Enh #1949: Add new command self-update
Enh #1953: Ls: Add JSON output support for restic ls cmd
Enh #1962: Stream JSON output for ls command
Enh #1967: Use --host everywhere
Enh #2028: Display size of cache directories

Details

Bugfix #1935: Remove truncated files from cache

When a file in the local cache is truncated, and restic tries to access data beyond the end of the (cached) file, it used to return an error "EOF". This is now fixed, such truncated files are removed and the data is fetched directly from the backend.

restic#1935
Bugfix #1978: Do not return an error when the scanner is slower than backup

When restic makes a backup, there's a background task called "scanner" which collects information on how many files and directories are to be saved, in order to display progress information to the user. When the backup finishes faster than the scanner, it is aborted because the result is not needed any more. This logic contained a bug, where quitting the scanner process was treated as an error, and caused restic to print an unhelpful error message ("context canceled").

restic#1978 restic#1991
Enhancement #1766: Restore: suppress lchown errors when not running as root

Like "cp" and "rsync" do, restic now only reports errors for changing the ownership of files during restore if it is run as root, on non-Windows operating systems. On Windows, the error is reported as usual.

restic#1766
Enhancement #1777: Improve the find command

We've updated the find command to support multiple patterns.

restic find is now able to list the snapshots containing a specific tree or blob, or even the snapshots that contain blobs belonging to a given pack. A list of IDs can be given, as long as they all have the same type.

The command find can also display the pack IDs the blobs belong to, if the --show-pack-id flag is provided.

restic#1777 restic#1780
Enhancement #1876: Display reason why forget keeps snapshots

We've added a column to the list of snapshots forget keeps which details the reasons to keep a particuliar snapshot. This makes debugging policies for forget much easier. Please remember to always try things out with --dry-run!

restic#1876
Enhancement #1891: Accept glob in paths loaded via --files-from

Before that, behaviour was different if paths were appended to command line or from a file, because wild card characters were expanded by shell if appended to command line, but not expanded if loaded from file.

restic#1891
Enhancement #1909: Reject files/dirs by name first

The current scanner/archiver code had an architectural limitation: it always ran the lstat() system call on all files and directories before a decision to include/exclude the file/dir was made. This lead to a lot of unnecessary system calls for items that could have been rejected by their name or path only.

We've changed the archiver/scanner implementation so that it now first rejects by name/path, and only runs the system call on the remaining items. This reduces the number of lstat() system calls a lot (depending on the exclude settings).

restic#1909 restic#1912
Enhancement #1920: Vendor dependencies with Go 1.11 Modules

Until now, we've used dep for managing dependencies, we've now switch to using Go modules. For users this does not change much, only if you want to compile restic without downloading anything with Go 1.11, then you need to run: go build -mod=vendor build.go

restic#1920
Enhancement #1940: Add directory filter to ls command

The ls command can now be filtered by directories, so that only files in the given directories will be shown. If the --recursive flag is specified, then ls will traverse subfolders and list their files as well.

It used to be possible to specify multiple snapshots, but that has been replaced by only one snapshot and the possibility of specifying multiple directories.

Specifying directories constrains the walk, which can significantly speed up the listing.

restic#1940 restic#1941
Enhancement #1949: Add new command self-update

We have added a new command called self-update which downloads the latest released version of restic from GitHub and replaces the current binary with it. It does not rely on any external program (so it'll work everywhere), but still verifies the GPG signature using the embedded GPG public key.

By default, the self-update command is hidden behind the selfupdate built tag, which is only set when restic is built using build.go (including official releases). The reason for this is that downstream distributions will then not include the command by default, so users are encouraged to use the platform-specific distribution mechanism.

restic#1949
Enhancement #1953: Ls: Add JSON output support for restic ls cmd

We've implemented listing files in the repository with JSON as output, just pass --json as an option to restic ls. This makes the output of the command machine readable.

restic#1953
Enhancement #1962: Stream JSON output for ls command

The ls command now supports JSON output with the global --json flag, and this change streams out JSON messages one object at a time rather than en entire array buffered in memory before encoding. The advantage is it allows large listings to be handled efficiently.

Two message types are printed: snapshots and nodes. A snapshot object will precede node objects which belong to that snapshot. The struct_type field can be used to determine which kind of message an object is.

restic#1962
Enhancement #1967: Use --host everywhere

We now use the flag --host for all commands which need a host name, using --hostname (e.g. for restic backup) still works, but will print a deprecation warning. Also, add the short option -H where possible.

restic#1967
Enhancement #2028: Display size of cache directories

The cache command now by default shows the size of the individual cache directories. It can be disabled with --no-size.

restic#2028 restic#2033

Changelog for restic 0.9.2 (2018-08-06)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.2 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1854: Allow saving files/dirs on different fs with --one-file-system
Fix #1861: Fix case-insensitive search with restic find
Fix #1870: Fix restore with --include
Fix #1880: Use --cache-dir argument for check command
Fix #1893: Return error when exclude file cannot be read
Enh #874: Add stats command to get information about a repository
Enh #1477: S3 backend: accept AWS_SESSION_TOKEN
Enh #1772: Add restore --verify to verify restored file content
Enh #1853: Add JSON output support to restic key list
Enh #1901: Update the Backblaze B2 library
Enh #1906: Add support for B2 application keys

Details

Bugfix #1854: Allow saving files/dirs on different fs with --one-file-system

Restic now allows saving files/dirs on a different file system in a subdir correctly even when --one-file-system is specified.

The first thing the restic archiver code does is to build a tree of the target files/directories. If it detects that a parent directory is already included (e.g. restic backup /foo /foo/bar/baz), it'll ignore the latter argument.

Without --one-file-system, that's perfectly valid: If /foo is to be archived, it will include /foo/bar/baz. But with --one-file-system, /foo/bar/baz may reside on a different file system, so it won't be included with /foo.

restic#1854 restic#1855
Bugfix #1861: Fix case-insensitive search with restic find

We've fixed the behavior for restic find -i PATTERN, which was broken in v0.9.1.

restic#1861
Bugfix #1870: Fix restore with --include

We fixed a bug which prevented restic to restore files with an include filter.

restic#1870 restic#1900
Bugfix #1880: Use --cache-dir argument for check command

check command now uses a temporary sub-directory of the specified directory if set using the --cache-dir argument. If not set, the cache directory is created in the default temporary directory as before. In either case a temporary cache is used to ensure the actual repository is checked (rather than a local copy).

The --cache-dir argument was not used by the check command, instead a cache directory was created in the temporary directory.

restic#1880
Bugfix #1893: Return error when exclude file cannot be read

A bug was found: when multiple exclude files were passed to restic and one of them could not be read, an error was printed and restic continued, ignoring even the existing exclude files. Now, an error message is printed and restic aborts when an exclude file cannot be read.

restic#1893
Enhancement #874: Add stats command to get information about a repository

restic#874 restic#1729
Enhancement #1477: S3 backend: accept AWS_SESSION_TOKEN

Before, it was not possible to use s3 backend with AWS temporary security credentials(with AWS_SESSION_TOKEN). This change gives higher priority to credentials.EnvAWS credentials provider.

restic#1477 restic#1479 restic#1647
Enhancement #1772: Add restore --verify to verify restored file content

Restore will print error message if restored file content does not match expected SHA256 checksum

restic#1772
Enhancement #1853: Add JSON output support to restic key list

This PR enables users to get the output of restic key list in JSON in addition to the existing table format.

restic#1853
Enhancement #1901: Update the Backblaze B2 library

We've updated the library we're using for accessing the Backblaze B2 service to 0.5.0 to include support for upcoming so-called "application keys". With this feature, you can create access credentials for B2 which are restricted to e.g. a single bucket or even a sub-directory of a bucket.

restic#1901 https://github.com/kurin/blazer
Enhancement #1906: Add support for B2 application keys

Restic can now use so-called "application keys" which can be created in the B2 dashboard and were only introduced recently. In contrast to the "master key", such keys can be restricted to a specific bucket and/or path.

restic#1906 restic#1914

Changelog for restic 0.9.1 (2018-06-10)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1801: Add limiting bandwidth to the rclone backend
Fix #1822: Allow uploading large files to MS Azure
Fix #1825: Correct find to not skip snapshots
Fix #1833: Fix caching files on error
Fix #1834: Resolve deadlock

Details

Bugfix #1801: Add limiting bandwidth to the rclone backend

The rclone backend did not respect --limit-upload or --limit-download. Oftentimes it's not necessary to use this, as the limiting in rclone itself should be used because it gives much better results, but in case a remote instance of rclone is used (e.g. called via ssh), it is still relevant to limit the bandwidth from restic to rclone.

restic#1801
Bugfix #1822: Allow uploading large files to MS Azure

Sometimes, restic creates files to be uploaded to the repository which are quite large, e.g. when saving directories with many entries or very large files. The MS Azure API does not allow uploading files larger that 256MiB directly, rather restic needs to upload them in blocks of 100MiB. This is now implemented.

restic#1822
Bugfix #1825: Correct find to not skip snapshots

Under certain circumstances, the find command was found to skip snapshots containing directories with files to look for when the directories haven't been modified at all, and were already printed as part of a different snapshot. This is now corrected.

In addition, we've switched to our own matching/pattern implementation, so now things like restic find "/home/user/foo/**/main.go" are possible.

restic#1825 restic#1823
Bugfix #1833: Fix caching files on error

During check it may happen that different threads access the same file in the backend, which is then downloaded into the cache only once. When that fails, only the thread which is responsible for downloading the file signals the correct error. The other threads just assume that the file has been downloaded successfully and then get an error when they try to access the cached file.

restic#1833
Bugfix #1834: Resolve deadlock

When the "scanning" process restic runs to find out how much data there is does not finish before the backup itself is done, restic stops doing anything. This is resolved now.

restic#1834 restic#1835

Changelog for restic 0.9.0 (2018-05-21)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.9.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1608: Respect time stamp for new backup when reading from stdin
Fix #1652: Ignore/remove invalid lock files
Fix #1684: Fix backend tests for rest-server
Fix #1730: Ignore sockets for restore
Fix #1745: Correctly parse the argument to --tls-client-cert
Enh #549: Rework archiver code
Enh #827: Add --new-password-file flag for non-interactive password changes
Enh #1433: Support UTF-16 encoding and process Byte Order Mark
Enh #1477: Accept AWS_SESSION_TOKEN for the s3 backend
Enh #1552: Use Google Application Default credentials
Enh #1561: Allow using rclone to access other services
Enh #1648: Ignore AWS permission denied error when creating a repository
Enh #1649: Add illumos/Solaris support
Enh #1665: Improve cache handling for restic check
Enh #1709: Improve messages restic check prints
Enh #1721: Add cache command to list cache dirs
Enh #1735: Allow keeping a time range of snaphots
Enh #1758: Allow saving OneDrive folders in Windows
Enh #1782: Use default AWS credentials chain for S3 backend

Details

Bugfix #1608: Respect time stamp for new backup when reading from stdin

When reading backups from stdin (via restic backup --stdin), restic now uses the time stamp for the new backup passed in --time.

restic#1608 restic#1703
Bugfix #1652: Ignore/remove invalid lock files

This corrects a bug introduced recently: When an invalid lock file in the repo is encountered (e.g. if the file is empty), the code used to ignore that, but now returns the error. Now, invalid files are ignored for the normal lock check, and removed when restic unlock --remove-all is run.

restic#1652 restic#1653
Bugfix #1684: Fix backend tests for rest-server

The REST server for restic now requires an explicit parameter (--no-auth) if no authentication should be allowed. This is fixed in the tests.

restic#1684
Bugfix #1730: Ignore sockets for restore

We've received a report and correct the behavior in which the restore code aborted restoring a directory when a socket was encountered. Unix domain socket files cannot be restored (they are created on the fly once a process starts listening). The error handling was corrected, and in addition we're now ignoring sockets during restore.

restic#1730 restic#1731
Bugfix #1745: Correctly parse the argument to --tls-client-cert

Previously, the --tls-client-cert method attempt to read ARGV[1] (hardcoded) instead of the argument that was passed to it. This has been corrected.

restic#1745 restic#1746
Enhancement #549: Rework archiver code

The core archiver code and the complementary code for the backup command was rewritten completely. This resolves very annoying issues such as 549. The first backup with this release of restic will likely result in all files being re-read locally, so it will take a lot longer. The next backup after that will be fast again.

Basically, with the old code, restic took the last path component of each to-be-saved file or directory as the top-level file/directory within the snapshot. This meant that when called as restic backup /home/user/foo, the snapshot would contain the files in the directory /home/user/foo as /foo.

This is not the case any more with the new archiver code. Now, restic works very similar to what tar does: When restic is called with an absolute path to save, then it'll preserve the directory structure within the snapshot. For the example above, the snapshot would contain the files in the directory within /home/user/foo in the snapshot. For relative directories, it only preserves the relative path components. So restic backup user/foo will save the files as /user/foo in the snapshot.

While we were at it, the status display and notification system was completely rewritten. By default, restic now shows which files are currently read (unless --quiet is specified) in a multi-line status display.

The backup command also gained a new option: --verbose. It can be specified once (which prints a bit more detail what restic is doing) or twice (which prints a line for each file/directory restic encountered, together with some statistics).

Another issue that was resolved is the new code only reads two files at most. The old code would read way too many files in parallel, thereby slowing down the backup process on spinning discs a lot.

restic#549 restic#1286 restic#446 restic#1344 restic#1416 restic#1456 restic#1145 restic#1160 restic#1494
Enhancement #827: Add --new-password-file flag for non-interactive password changes

This makes it possible to change a repository password without being prompted.

restic#827 restic#1720 https://forum.restic.net/t/changing-repo-password-without-prompt/591
Enhancement #1433: Support UTF-16 encoding and process Byte Order Mark

On Windows, text editors commonly leave a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of the file to define which encoding is used (oftentimes UTF-16). We've added code to support processing the BOMs in text files, like the exclude files, the password file and the file passed via --files-from. This does not apply to any file being saved in a backup, those are not touched and archived as they are.

restic#1433 restic#1738 restic#1748
Enhancement #1477: Accept AWS_SESSION_TOKEN for the s3 backend

Before, it was not possible to use s3 backend with AWS temporary security credentials(with AWS_SESSION_TOKEN). This change gives higher priority to credentials.EnvAWS credentials provider.

restic#1477 restic#1479 restic#1647
Enhancement #1552: Use Google Application Default credentials

Google provide libraries to generate appropriate credentials with various fallback sources. This change uses the library to generate our GCS client, which allows us to make use of these extra methods.

This should be backward compatible with previous restic behaviour while adding the additional capabilities to auth from Google's internal metadata endpoints. For users running restic in GCP this can make authentication far easier than it was before.

restic#1552 https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/application-default-credentials
Enhancement #1561: Allow using rclone to access other services

We've added the ability to use rclone to store backup data on all backends that it supports. This was done in collaboration with Nick, the author of rclone. You can now use it to first configure a service, then restic manages the rest (starting and stopping rclone). For details, please see the manual.

restic#1561 restic#1657 https://rclone.org
Enhancement #1648: Ignore AWS permission denied error when creating a repository

It's not possible to use s3 backend scoped to a subdirectory(with specific permissions). Restic doesn't try to create repository in a subdirectory, when 'bucket exists' of parent directory check fails due to permission issues.

restic#1648
Enhancement #1649: Add illumos/Solaris support

restic#1649
Enhancement #1665: Improve cache handling for restic check

For safety reasons, restic does not use a local metadata cache for the restic check command, so that data is loaded from the repository and restic can check it's in good condition. When the cache is disabled, restic will fetch each tiny blob needed for checking the integrity using a separate backend request. For non-local backends, that will take a long time, and depending on the backend (e.g. B2) may also be much more expensive.

This PR adds a few commits which will change the behavior as follows:
- When restic check is called without any additional parameters, it will build a new cache in a temporary directory, which is removed at the end of the check. This way, we'll get readahead for metadata files (so restic will fetch the whole file when the first blob from the file is requested), but all data is freshly fetched from the storage backend. This is the default behavior and will work for almost all users.
- When restic check is called with --with-cache, the default on-disc cache is used. This behavior hasn't changed since the cache was introduced.
- When --no-cache is specified, restic falls back to the old behavior, and read all tiny blobs in separate requests.
restic#1665 restic#1694 restic#1696
Enhancement #1709: Improve messages restic check prints

Some messages restic check prints are not really errors, so from now on restic does not treat them as errors any more and exits cleanly.

restic#1709 https://forum.restic.net/t/what-is-the-standard-procedure-to-follow-if-a-backup-or-restore-is-interrupted/571/2
Enhancement #1721: Add cache command to list cache dirs

The command cache was added, it allows listing restic's cache directoriers together with the last usage. It also allows removing old cache dirs without having to access a repo, via restic cache --cleanup

restic#1721 restic#1749
Enhancement #1735: Allow keeping a time range of snaphots

We've added the --keep-within option to the forget command. It instructs restic to keep all snapshots within the given duration since the newest snapshot. For example, running restic forget --keep-within 5m7d will keep all snapshots which have been made in the five months and seven days since the latest snapshot.

restic#1735
Enhancement #1758: Allow saving OneDrive folders in Windows

Restic now contains a bugfix to two libraries, which allows saving OneDrive folders in Windows. In order to use the newer versions of the libraries, the minimal version required to compile restic is now Go 1.9.

restic#1758 restic#1765
Enhancement #1782: Use default AWS credentials chain for S3 backend

Adds support for file credentials to the S3 backend (e.g. ~/.aws/credentials), and reorders the credentials chain for the S3 backend to match AWS's standard, which is static credentials, env vars, credentials file, and finally remote.

restic#1782

Changelog for restic 0.8.3 (2018-02-26)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.8.3 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1633: Fixed unexpected 'pack file cannot be listed' error
Fix #1638: Handle errors listing files in the backend
Fix #1641: Ignore files with invalid names in the repo
Enh #1497: Add --read-data-subset flag to check command
Enh #1560: Retry all repository file download errors
Enh #1623: Don't check for presence of files in the backend before writing
Enh #1634: Upgrade B2 client library, reduce HTTP requests

Details

Bugfix #1633: Fixed unexpected 'pack file cannot be listed' error

Due to a regression introduced in 0.8.2, the rebuild-index and prune commands failed to read pack files with size of 587, 588, 589 or 590 bytes.

restic#1633 restic#1635
Bugfix #1638: Handle errors listing files in the backend

A user reported in the forum that restic completes a backup although a concurrent prune operation was running. A few error messages were printed, but the backup was attempted and completed successfully. No error code was returned.

This should not happen: The repository is exclusively locked during prune, so when restic backup is run in parallel, it should abort and return an error code instead.

It was found that the bug was in the code introduced only recently, which retries a List() operation on the backend should that fail. It is now corrected.

restic#1638 https://forum.restic.net/t/restic-backup-returns-0-exit-code-when-already-locked/484
Bugfix #1641: Ignore files with invalid names in the repo

The release 0.8.2 introduced a bug: when restic encounters files in the repo which do not have a valid name, it tries to load a file with a name of lots of zeroes instead of ignoring it. This is now resolved, invalid file names are just ignored.

restic#1641 restic#1643 https://forum.restic.net/t/help-fixing-repo-no-such-file/485/3
Enhancement #1497: Add --read-data-subset flag to check command

This change introduces ability to check integrity of a subset of repository data packs. This can be used to spread integrity check of larger repositories over a period of time.

restic#1497 restic#1556
Enhancement #1560: Retry all repository file download errors

Restic will now retry failed downloads, similar to other operations.

restic#1560
Enhancement #1623: Don't check for presence of files in the backend before writing

Before, all backend implementations were required to return an error if the file that is to be written already exists in the backend. For most backends, that means making a request (e.g. via HTTP) and returning an error when the file already exists.

This is not accurate, the file could have been created between the HTTP request testing for it, and when writing starts, so we've relaxed this requeriment, which saves one additional HTTP request per newly added file.

restic#1623
Enhancement #1634: Upgrade B2 client library, reduce HTTP requests

We've upgraded the B2 client library restic uses to access BackBlaze B2. This reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to upload a new file from two to one, which should improve throughput to B2.

restic#1634

Changelog for restic 0.8.2 (2018-02-17)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.8.2 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1506: Limit bandwith at the http.RoundTripper for HTTP based backends
Fix #1512: Restore directory permissions as the last step
Fix #1528: Correctly create missing subdirs in data/
Fix #1589: Complete intermediate index upload
Fix #1590: Strip spaces for lines read via --files-from
Fix #1594: Google Cloud Storage: Use generic HTTP transport
Fix #1595: Backup: Remove bandwidth display
Enh #1507: Only reload snapshots once per minute for fuse mount
Enh #1522: Add support for TLS client certificate authentication
Enh #1538: Reduce memory allocations for querying the index
Enh #1541: Reduce number of remote requests during repository check
Enh #1549: Speed up querying across indices and scanning existing files
Enh #1554: Fuse/mount: Correctly handle EOF, add template option
Enh #1564: Don't terminate ssh on SIGINT
Enh #1567: Reduce number of backend requests for rebuild-index and prune
Enh #1579: Retry Backend.List() in case of errors
Enh #1584: Limit index file size

Details

Bugfix #1506: Limit bandwith at the http.RoundTripper for HTTP based backends

restic#1506 restic#1511
Bugfix #1512: Restore directory permissions as the last step

This change allows restoring into directories that were not writable during backup. Before, restic created the directory, set the read-only mode and then failed to create files in the directory. This change now restores the directory (with its permissions) as the very last step.

restic#1512 restic#1536
Bugfix #1528: Correctly create missing subdirs in data/

restic#1528 restic#1529
Bugfix #1589: Complete intermediate index upload

After a user posted a comprehensive report of what he observed, we were able to find a bug and correct it: During backup, restic uploads so-called "intermediate" index files. When the backup finishes during a transfer of such an intermediate index, the upload is cancelled, but the backup is finished without an error. This leads to an inconsistent state, where the snapshot references data that is contained in the repo, but is not referenced in any index.

The situation can be resolved by building a new index with rebuild-index, but looks very confusing at first. Since all the data got uploaded to the repo successfully, there was no risk of data loss, just minor inconvenience for our users.

restic#1589 https://forum.restic.net/t/error-loading-tree-check-prune-and-forget-gives-error-b2-backend/406
Bugfix #1590: Strip spaces for lines read via --files-from

Leading and trailing spaces in lines read via --files-from are now stripped, so it behaves the same as with lines read via --exclude-file.

restic#1590 restic#1613
Bugfix #1594: Google Cloud Storage: Use generic HTTP transport

It was discovered that the Google Cloud Storage backend did not use the generic HTTP transport, so things such as bandwidth limiting with --limit-upload did not work. This is resolved now.

restic#1594
Bugfix #1595: Backup: Remove bandwidth display

This commit removes the bandwidth displayed during backup process. It is misleading and seldomly correct, because it's neither the "read bandwidth" (only for the very first backup) nor the "upload bandwidth". Many users are confused about (and rightly so), c.f. #1581, #1033, #1591

We'll eventually replace this display with something more relevant when the new archiver code is ready.

restic#1595
Enhancement #1507: Only reload snapshots once per minute for fuse mount

restic#1507
Enhancement #1522: Add support for TLS client certificate authentication

Support has been added for using a TLS client certificate for authentication to HTTP based backend. A file containing the PEM encoded private key and certificate can be set using the --tls-client-cert option.

restic#1522 restic#1524
Enhancement #1538: Reduce memory allocations for querying the index

This change reduces the internal memory allocations when the index data structures in memory are queried if a blob (part of a file) already exists in the repo. It should speed up backup a bit, and maybe even reduce RAM usage.

restic#1538
Enhancement #1541: Reduce number of remote requests during repository check

This change eliminates redundant remote repository calls and significantly improves repository check time.

restic#1541 restic#1548
Enhancement #1549: Speed up querying across indices and scanning existing files

This change increases the whenever a blob (part of a file) is searched for in a restic repository. This will reduce cpu usage some when backing up files already backed up by restic. Cpu usage is further decreased when scanning files.

restic#1549
Enhancement #1554: Fuse/mount: Correctly handle EOF, add template option

We've added the --snapshot-template string, which can be used to specify a template for a snapshot directory. In addition, accessing data after the end of a file via the fuse mount is now handled correctly.

restic#1554
Enhancement #1564: Don't terminate ssh on SIGINT

We've reworked the code which runs the ssh login for the sftp backend so that it can prompt for a password (if needed) but does not exit when the user presses CTRL+C (SIGINT) e.g. during backup. This allows restic to properly shut down when it receives SIGINT and remove the lock file from the repo, afterwards exiting the ssh process.

restic#1564 restic#1588
Enhancement #1567: Reduce number of backend requests for rebuild-index and prune

We've found a way to reduce then number of backend requests for the rebuild-index and prune operations. This significantly speeds up the operations for high-latency backends.

restic#1567 restic#1574 restic#1575
Enhancement #1579: Retry Backend.List() in case of errors

restic#1579
Enhancement #1584: Limit index file size

Before, restic would create a single new index file on prune or rebuild-index, this may lead to memory problems when this huge index is created and loaded again. We're now limiting the size of the index file, and split newly created index files into several smaller ones. This allows restic to be more memory-efficient.

restic#1412 restic#979 restic#526 restic#1584

Changelog for restic 0.8.1 (2017-12-27)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.8.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1454: Correct cache dir location for Windows and Darwin
Fix #1457: Improve s3 backend with DigitalOcean Spaces
Fix #1459: Disable handling SIGPIPE
Chg #1452: Do not save atime by default
Enh #11: Add the diff command
Enh #1436: Add code to detect old cache directories
Enh #1439: Improve cancellation logic

Details

Bugfix #1454: Correct cache dir location for Windows and Darwin

The cache directory on Windows and Darwin was not correct, instead the directory .cache was used.

restic#1454
Bugfix #1457: Improve s3 backend with DigitalOcean Spaces

restic#1457 restic#1459
Bugfix #1459: Disable handling SIGPIPE

We've disabled handling SIGPIPE again. Turns out, writing to broken TCP connections also raised SIGPIPE, so restic exits on the first write to a broken connection. Instead, restic should retry the request.

restic#1457 restic#1466 restic#1459
Change #1452: Do not save atime by default

By default, the access time for files and dirs is not saved any more. It is not possible to reliably disable updating the access time during a backup, so for the next backup the access time is different again. This means a lot of metadata is saved. If you want to save the access time anyway, pass --with-atime to the backup command.

restic#1452
Enhancement #11: Add the diff command

The command diff was added, it allows comparing two snapshots and listing all differences.

restic#11 restic#1460 restic#1462
Enhancement #1436: Add code to detect old cache directories

We've added code to detect old cache directories of repositories that haven't been used in a long time, restic now prints a note when it detects that such dirs exist. Also, the option --cleanup-cache was added to automatically remove such directories. That's not a problem because the cache will be rebuild once a repo is accessed again.

restic#1436
Enhancement #1439: Improve cancellation logic

The cancellation logic was improved, restic can now shut down cleanly when requested to do so (e.g. via ctrl+c).

restic#1439

Changelog for restic 0.8.0 (2017-11-26)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.8.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Sec #1445: Prevent writing outside the target directory during restore
Fix #1256: Re-enable workaround for S3 backend
Fix #1291: Reuse backend TCP connections to BackBlaze B2
Fix #1317: Run prune when forget --prune is called with just snapshot IDs
Fix #1437: Remove implicit path /restic for the s3 backend
Enh #448: Sftp backend prompts for password
Enh #510: Add dump command
Enh #1040: Add local metadata cache
Enh #1102: Add subdirectory ids to fuse mount
Enh #1114: Add --cacert to specify TLS certificates to check against
Enh #1216: Add upload/download limiting
Enh #1249: Add latest symlink in fuse mount
Enh #1269: Add --compact to forget command
Enh #1271: Cache results for excludes for backup
Enh #1274: Add generate command, replaces manpage and autocomplete
Enh #1281: Google Cloud Storage backend needs less permissions
Enh #1319: Make check print no errors found explicitly
Enh #1353: Retry failed backend requests
Enh #1367: Allow comments in files read from via --file-from

Details

Security #1445: Prevent writing outside the target directory during restore

A vulnerability was found in the restic restorer, which allowed attackers in special circumstances to restore files to a location outside of the target directory. Due to the circumstances we estimate this to be a low-risk vulnerability, but urge all users to upgrade to the latest version of restic.

Exploiting the vulnerability requires a Linux/Unix system which saves backups via restic and a Windows systems which restores files from the repo. In addition, the attackers need to be able to create files with arbitrary names which are then saved to the restic repo. For example, by creating a file named "..\test.txt" (which is a perfectly legal filename on Linux) and restoring a snapshot containing this file on Windows, it would be written to the parent of the target directory.

We'd like to thank Tyler Spivey for reporting this responsibly!

restic#1445
Bugfix #1256: Re-enable workaround for S3 backend

We've re-enabled a workaround for minio-go (the library we're using to access s3 backends), this reduces memory usage.

restic#1256 restic#1267
Bugfix #1291: Reuse backend TCP connections to BackBlaze B2

A bug was discovered in the library we're using to access Backblaze, it now reuses already established TCP connections which should be a lot faster and not cause network failures any more.

restic#1291 restic#1301
Bugfix #1317: Run prune when forget --prune is called with just snapshot IDs

A bug in the forget command caused prune not to be run when --prune was specified without a policy, e.g. when only snapshot IDs that should be forgotten are listed manually.

restic#1317
Bugfix #1437: Remove implicit path /restic for the s3 backend

The s3 backend used the subdir restic within a bucket if no explicit path after the bucket name was specified. Since this version, restic does not use this default path any more. If you created a repo on s3 in a bucket without specifying a path within the bucket, you need to add /restic at the end of the repository specification to access your repo: s3:s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/restic

restic#1292 restic#1437
Enhancement #448: Sftp backend prompts for password

The sftp backend now prompts for the password if a password is necessary for login.

restic#448 restic#1270
Enhancement #510: Add dump command

We've added the dump command which prints a file from a snapshot to stdout. This can e.g. be used to restore files read with backup --stdin.

restic#510 restic#1346
Enhancement #1040: Add local metadata cache

We've added a local cache for metadata so that restic doesn't need to load all metadata (snapshots, indexes, ...) from the repo each time it starts. By default the cache is active, but there's a new global option --no-cache that can be used to disable the cache. By deafult, the cache a standard cache folder for the OS, which can be overridden with --cache-dir. The cache will automatically populate, indexes and snapshots are saved as they are loaded. Cache directories for repos that haven't been used recently can automatically be removed by restic with the --cleanup-cache option.

A related change was to by default create pack files in the repo that contain either data or metadata, not both mixed together. This allows easy caching of only the metadata files. The next run of restic prune will untangle mixed files automatically.

restic#29 restic#738 restic#282 restic#1040 restic#1287 restic#1436 restic#1265
Enhancement #1102: Add subdirectory ids to fuse mount

The fuse mount now has an ids subdirectory which contains the snapshots below their (short) IDs.

restic#1102 restic#1299 restic#1320
Enhancement #1114: Add --cacert to specify TLS certificates to check against

We've added the --cacert option which can be used to pass one (or more) CA certificates to restic. These are used in addition to the system CA certificates to verify HTTPS certificates (e.g. for the REST backend).

restic#1114 restic#1276
Enhancement #1216: Add upload/download limiting

We've added support for rate limiting through --limit-upload and --limit-download flags.

restic#1216 restic#1336 restic#1358
Enhancement #1249: Add latest symlink in fuse mount

The directory structure in the fuse mount now exposes a symlink latest which points to the latest snapshot in that particular directory.

restic#1249
Enhancement #1269: Add --compact to forget command

The option --compact was added to the forget command to provide the same compact view as the snapshots command.

restic#1269
Enhancement #1271: Cache results for excludes for backup

The backup command now caches the result of excludes for a directory.

restic#1271 restic#1326
Enhancement #1274: Add generate command, replaces manpage and autocomplete

The generate command has been added, which replaces the now removed commands manpage and autocomplete. This release of restic contains the most recent manpages in doc/man and the auto-completion files for bash and zsh in doc/bash-completion.sh and doc/zsh-completion.zsh

restic#1274 restic#1282
Enhancement #1281: Google Cloud Storage backend needs less permissions

The Google Cloud Storage backend no longer requires the service account to have the storage.buckets.get permission ("Storage Admin" role) in restic init if the bucket already exists.

restic#1281
Enhancement #1319: Make check print no errors found explicitly

The check command now explicetly prints No errors were found when no errors could be found.

restic#1303 restic#1319
Enhancement #1353: Retry failed backend requests

restic#1353
Enhancement #1367: Allow comments in files read from via --file-from

When the list of files/dirs to be saved is read from a file with --files-from, comment lines (starting with #) are now ignored.

restic#1367 restic#1368

Changelog for restic 0.7.3 (2017-09-20)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.7.3 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1246: List all files stored in Google Cloud Storage

Details

Bugfix #1246: List all files stored in Google Cloud Storage

For large backups stored in Google Cloud Storage, the prune command fails because listing only returns the first 1000 files. This has been corrected, no data is lost in the process. In addition, a plausibility check was added to prune.

restic#1246 restic#1247

Changelog for restic 0.7.2 (2017-09-13)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.7.2 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1164: Make the key remove command behave as documented
Fix #1167: Do not create a local repo unless init is used
Fix #1191: Make sure to write profiling files on interrupt
Enh #317: Add --exclude-caches and --exclude-if-present
Enh #697: Automatically generate man pages for all restic commands
Enh #1044: Improve restore, do not traverse/load excluded directories
Enh #1061: Add Dockerfile and official Docker image
Enh #1126: Use the standard Go git repository layout, use dep for vendoring
Enh #1132: Make key command always prompt for a password
Enh #1134: Add support for storing backups on Google Cloud Storage
Enh #1144: Properly report errors when reading files with exclude patterns
Enh #1149: Add support for storing backups on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
Enh #1179: Resolve name conflicts, append a counter
Enh #1196: Add --group-by to forget command for flexible grouping
Enh #1203: Print stats on all BSD systems when SIGINFO (ctrl+t) is received
Enh #1205: Allow specifying time/date for a backup with --time
Enh #1218: Add --compact to snapshots command

Details

Bugfix #1164: Make the key remove command behave as documented

restic#1164
Bugfix #1167: Do not create a local repo unless init is used

When a restic command other than init is used with a local repository and the repository directory does not exist, restic creates the directory structure. That's an error, only the init command should create the dir.

restic#1167 restic#1182
Bugfix #1191: Make sure to write profiling files on interrupt

Since a few releases restic had the ability to write profiling files for memory and CPU usage when debug is enabled. It was discovered that when restic is interrupted (ctrl+c is pressed), the proper shutdown hook is not run. This is now corrected.

restic#1191
Enhancement #317: Add --exclude-caches and --exclude-if-present

A new option --exclude-caches was added that allows excluding cache directories (that are tagged as such). This is a special case of a more generic option --exclude-if-present which excludes a directory if a file with a specific name (and contents) is present.

restic#317 restic#1170 restic#1224
Enhancement #697: Automatically generate man pages for all restic commands

restic#697 restic#1147
Enhancement #1044: Improve restore, do not traverse/load excluded directories

restic#1044
Enhancement #1061: Add Dockerfile and official Docker image

restic#1061
Enhancement #1126: Use the standard Go git repository layout, use dep for vendoring

The git repository layout was changed to resemble the layout typically used in Go projects, we're not using gb for building restic any more and vendoring the dependencies is now taken care of by dep.

restic#1126
Enhancement #1132: Make key command always prompt for a password

The key command now prompts for a password even if the original password to access a repo has been specified via the RESTIC_PASSWORD environment variable or a password file.

restic#1132 restic#1133
Enhancement #1134: Add support for storing backups on Google Cloud Storage

restic#211 restic#1134 restic#1052
Enhancement #1144: Properly report errors when reading files with exclude patterns

restic#1144
Enhancement #1149: Add support for storing backups on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

The library we're using to access the service requires Go 1.8, so restic now needs at least Go 1.8.

restic#609 restic#1149 restic#1059
Enhancement #1179: Resolve name conflicts, append a counter

restic#1179 restic#1209
Enhancement #1196: Add --group-by to forget command for flexible grouping

restic#1196
Enhancement #1203: Print stats on all BSD systems when SIGINFO (ctrl+t) is received

restic#1203 restic#1082 (comment)
Enhancement #1205: Allow specifying time/date for a backup with --time

restic#1205
Enhancement #1218: Add --compact to snapshots command

The option --compact was added to the snapshots command to get a better overview of the snapshots in a repo. It limits each snapshot to a single line.

restic#1218 restic#1223

Changelog for restic 0.7.1 (2017-07-22)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.7.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #1115: Fix prune, only include existing files in indexes
Enh #1055: Create subdirs below data/ for local/sftp backends
Enh #1067: Allow loading credentials for s3 from IAM
Enh #1073: Add migrate cmd to migrate from s3legacy to default layout
Enh #1080: Ignore chmod() errors on filesystems which do not support it
Enh #1081: Clarify semantic for --tag for the forget command
Enh #1082: Print stats on SIGINFO on Darwin and FreeBSD (ctrl+t)

Details

Bugfix #1115: Fix prune, only include existing files in indexes

A bug was found (and corrected) in the index rebuilding after prune, which led to indexes which include blobs that were not present in the repo any more. There were already checks in place which detected this situation and aborted with an error message. A new run of either prune or rebuild-index corrected the index files. This is now fixed and a test has been added to detect this.

restic#1115
Enhancement #1055: Create subdirs below data/ for local/sftp backends

The local and sftp backends now create the subdirs below data/ on open/init. This way, restic makes sure that they always exist. This is connected to an issue for the sftp server.

restic#1055 restic/rest-server#11 (comment) restic#1077 restic#1105
Enhancement #1067: Allow loading credentials for s3 from IAM

When no S3 credentials are specified in the environment variables, restic now tries to load credentials from an IAM instance profile when the s3 backend is used.

restic#1067 restic#1086
Enhancement #1073: Add migrate cmd to migrate from s3legacy to default layout

The migrate command for changing the s3legacy layout to the default layout for s3 backends has been improved: It can now be restarted with restic migrate --force s3_layout and automatically retries operations on error.

restic#1073 restic#1075
Enhancement #1080: Ignore chmod() errors on filesystems which do not support it

restic#1080 restic#1112
Enhancement #1081: Clarify semantic for --tag for the forget command

restic#1081 restic#1090
Enhancement #1082: Print stats on SIGINFO on Darwin and FreeBSD (ctrl+t)

restic#1082

Changelog for restic 0.7.0 (2017-07-01)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.7.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Fix #965: Switch to default repo layout for the s3 backend
Fix #1013: Switch back to using the high-level minio-go API for s3
Enh #512: Add Backblaze B2 backend
Enh #636: Add dirs tags and hosts to fuse mount
Enh #975: Add new backend for OpenStack Swift
Enh #989: Improve performance of the find command
Enh #998: Improve performance of the fuse mount
Enh #1021: Detect invalid backend name and print error
Enh #1029: Remove invalid pack files when prune is run

Details

Bugfix #965: Switch to default repo layout for the s3 backend

The default layout for the s3 backend is now default (instead of s3legacy). Also, there's a new migrate command to convert an existing repo, it can be run like this: restic migrate s3_layout

restic#965 restic#1004
Bugfix #1013: Switch back to using the high-level minio-go API for s3

For the s3 backend we're back to using the high-level API the s3 client library for uploading data, a few users reported dropped connections (which the library will automatically retry now).

restic#1013 restic#1023 restic#1025
Enhancement #512: Add Backblaze B2 backend

restic#512 restic#978
Enhancement #636: Add dirs tags and hosts to fuse mount

The fuse mount now has two more directories: tags contains a subdir for each tag, which in turn contains only the snapshots that have this tag. The subdir hosts contains a subdir for each host that has a snapshot, and the subdir contains the snapshots for that host.

restic#636 restic#1050
Enhancement #975: Add new backend for OpenStack Swift

restic#975 restic#648
Enhancement #989: Improve performance of the find command

Improved performance for the find command: Restic recognizes paths it has already checked for the files in question, so the number of backend requests is reduced a lot.

restic#989 restic#993
Enhancement #998: Improve performance of the fuse mount

Listing directories which contain large files now is significantly faster.

restic#998
Enhancement #1021: Detect invalid backend name and print error

Restic now tries to detect when an invalid/unknown backend is used and returns an error message.

restic#1021 restic#1070
Enhancement #1029: Remove invalid pack files when prune is run

The prune command has been improved and will now remove invalid pack files, for example files that have not been uploaded completely because a backup was interrupted.

restic#1029 restic#1036

Changelog for restic 0.6.1 (2017-06-01)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.6.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Enh #974: Remove regular status reports
Enh #981: Remove temporary path from binary in build.go
Enh #985: Allow multiple parallel idle HTTP connections

Details

Enhancement #974: Remove regular status reports

Regular status report: We've removed the status report that was printed every 10 seconds when restic is run non-interactively. You can still force reporting the current status by sending a USR1 signal to the process.

restic#974
Enhancement #981: Remove temporary path from binary in build.go

The build.go now strips the temporary directory used for compilation from the binary. This is the first step in enabling reproducible builds.

restic#981
Enhancement #985: Allow multiple parallel idle HTTP connections

Backends based on HTTP now allow several idle connections in parallel. This is especially important for the REST backend, which (when used with a local server) may create a lot connections and exhaust available ports quickly.

restic#985 restic#986

Changelog for restic 0.6.0 (2017-05-29)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.6.0 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

Enh #957: Make forget consistent
Enh #962: Improve memory and runtime for the s3 backend
Enh #966: Unify repository layout for all backends

Details

Enhancement #957: Make forget consistent

The forget command was corrected to be more consistent in which snapshots are to be forgotten. It is possible that the new code removes more snapshots than before, so please review what would be deleted by using the --dry-run option.

restic#953 restic#957
Enhancement #962: Improve memory and runtime for the s3 backend

We've updated the library used for accessing s3, switched to using a lower level API and added caching for some requests. This lead to a decrease in memory usage and a great speedup. In addition, we added benchmark functions for all backends, so we can track improvements over time. The Continuous Integration test service we're using (Travis) now runs the s3 backend tests not only against a Minio server, but also against the Amazon s3 live service, so we should be notified of any regressions much sooner.

restic#962 restic#960 restic#946 restic#938 restic#883
Enhancement #966: Unify repository layout for all backends

Up to now the s3 backend used a special repository layout. We've decided to unify the repository layout and implemented the default layout also for the s3 backend. For creating a new repository on s3 with the default layout, use restic -o s3.layout=default init. For further commands the option is not necessary any more, restic will automatically detect the correct layout to use. A future version will switch to the default layout for new repositories.

restic#965 restic#966

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