Restic backup and Windows paths

I recently stumbled upon restic and since I haven’t really setup a backup of my windows machine¹, I wanted to give it a try.

I love it 💛 The software is straight to the point, not bloated and using it in a terminal is a bonus for me!

However, there was one pitfall with windows paths (and I’m not even surprised by this):

When you select the folder for the backup, you can choose absolute or relative paths.
The backup snapshot will always show the absolute path.
Additionally, the path in the snapshot view will be displayed in Windows style (with a colon and backward slashes).
The path in the actual backup will vary depending on your backup command and can only be displayed with ls

# Backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git with an absolute path (ID b713711c)
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git\

# Backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git with a relative path (ID da8fe3c7)
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ backup .\Git\

# Display restic snapshots
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ snapshots
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
ID        Time                 Host        Tags        Paths
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
b713711c  2023-09-30 21:47:58  Horscht               C:\Users\restic_demo\Git
da8fe3c7  2023-09-30 22:03:19  Horscht               C:\Users\restic_demo\Git
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Display snapshot files and folders for b713711c
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ ls b713711c
enter password for repository:
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
snapshot b713711c of [C:\Users\restic_demo\Git] filtered by [] at 2023-09-30 21:47:58.6977882 +0200 CEST):
/C
/C/Users
/C/Users/restic_demo
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git/blog.bdw.li
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git/blog.bdw.li/.git

# Display snapshot files and folders for da8fe3c7
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ ls da8fe3c7
enter password for repository:
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
snapshot da8fe3c7 of [C:\Users\restic_demo\Git] filtered by [] at 2023-09-30 22:03:19.7184899 +0200 CEST):
/Git
/Git/blog.bdw.li
/Git/blog.bdw.li/.git

I no case would I be able to restore the data using the path from the snapshot view C:\Users\restic_demo\Git. It took me a few confused minutes to figure that out. And I didn’t find anything about it in the docs. At last in the Github issue #2792 was a side note that mentioned the proper paths.

A synchronized nextcloud folder ist not a backup ╰(￣ω￣ｏ) ↩︎