Windows

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.

I’m using Mailstore Home to archive my personal emails for a while now. And while I didn’t find any specific documentation on command line options, you can actually use /c archive --id=$n to automatically start the archive process on application start. I currently archive three mailboxes and my scheduled task looks something like this:

MailStoreHome.exe /c archive --id="1,2,3"

At the end I still have to close the Mailstore Window manually. There are tools like AutoIt, that you can use to hide the GUI, but I don’t mind closing the window myself. The task runs right after my login and I just let it do it’s thing in the background. It usually doesn’t take longer then a minute anyway. If you do mind the window, check out the article on andysblog.de¹.