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Comment by dividuum | Hacker News Reader

You could use one of those services that expect a regular http heartbeat. I'm personally using uptimerobot for that. Within a .bat or .sh file, add a

  restic [...] && curl <heartbeat-url>

and you'll get eventually notified if backup jobs fails too often.

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I've tinkered with that using healthchecks, but I don't really trust that I know what I'm doing when setting it up.

Restic is also confusing to me with forgetting snapshots and doing cleanup, I don't understand why that isn't run as part of the backup (or is it? The docs aren't clear).

no, you have to run "restic forget" with the policy you want (keep last X, last monthly Y, etc.) followed up with a "restic prune". Or you can pass "--prune" to the "forget" command I think.

You don't always want to forget/prune snapshots. Especially if you're using a cloud service like B2. It can easily cost you more to prune than actual storage costs if you're not careful.

See here: https://www.seanh.cc/2022/04/03/restic/#maintaining-your-bac...

and

https://kdecherf.com/blog/2018/12/28/restic-and-backblaze-b2...

Thanks for the links! That's helpful, the part about B2 makes sense.

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