As always, I promised more updates and then immediately disappeared. This is a common pattern - or at least it’s something I do regularly. We have this tool at work called “snippets”, and I usually start writing there but then it’s kind of hard to maintain consistent schedule. I should probably write a dedicated rant about this at some point.

Anyway, today it’s going to be short and pointless.

A story of some backups

For a long time I was using borg-backup for my personal backup needs and it was dire. It was painful to manage and work with (I wrote a custom wrapper so it could work over https), the performance was awful. Then restic appeared, and I almost jumped on it full speed. Then I realized that without compression my backups are 5x bigger than they should be.

Anyway, at some point restic finally added compression, so this time I’m definitely going to do it! However, it just so happened that pack size was capped at 16 megabytes or so, and when writing to the filesystem it produces a gazillion of files. Which is not du-friendly, or any fs-friendly at all.

At that time I was experimenting with haystack-type storages (specifically, I wanted to write a library which gives you an append-only haystack with leveldb-based index on the side), so naturally I wrote a rest-server on top of it. And it was great! It just, you know, takes more backups and that’s it. Shiny!

This xmas I decided to shuffle things around, including with the backups (which reached 3T). So I started digging some threads and stumbled upon a post by some dude who was saying that in rustic packsize is a function of the reposize. At first, I thought “huh weird typo”. But then - well, there’s the whole restic rewrite in rust!

So that’s it, folks. I’m moving to rustic. Repacking all my backups in the process. I hope I’ll still have at least some of my data.

Next up: how to replace a backplane in Aoostar WTR Pro (and why).