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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

I was happy with my restic, borg (vorta), and tarsnap backup setup until one day I had to retrieve just one file from the backups and I realised there was no straight forward way to do that in any of these. Now I think I must look for backup which lets be “easily” get my files back and search whether something is there by a certain approximate name among my backups without having me deal with mounts (that too one version at a time) and often fail. It would be nice to just know that file/dir “abc xyz” or with similar names were backed up in snapshots m, n,…, z. Then I can just fetch the version I want.

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You can just mount a Borg archive with a single command and then explore it like any other filesystem

I like this tool for Restic: https://github.com/emuell/restic-browser

Many if not most backup tools have some way to mount a backup archive as a file system after which you can use whatever tools you like to peruse its contents. Here's some examples of tools I use or have used:

   $ apropos borg-mount
   borg2-mount (1)      - Mount archive or an entire repository as a FUSE filesystem

   $ restic -r /srv/restic-repo mount /mnt/restic
   enter password for repository:
   Now serving /srv/restic-repo at /mnt/restic
   Use another terminal or tool to browse the contents of this folder.
   When finished, quit with Ctrl-c here or umount the mountpoint.

   $ proxmox-backup-client mount <snapshot> <archive-name> <target> [OPTIONS]

Currently mostly using borg2 for occasional manual backups to external drives and proxmox-backup-client/server for backups to a central archive. All have been 'battle tested' as in 'used to restore broken systems'.

Not sure that I understand.

What's hard about `restic -r /media/ehecatl42/t14g3-backup/t14g3-restic-repo restore latest --target /home/ehecatl42/Desktop/nvim-restore/ --include /home/ehecatl42/.config/nvim/`* and just `cp`ing your missing files from that.

* From my recent .bash_history

If you want to make a point about something being “not hard” maybe using a less messy command would bring that point across better ;)

It may look messy but this is really the minimal amount of info. You need the location of backup, operation, time for restoration, pattern to restore and the destination. If you already set up the backup part of restic, then this command shouldn't be hard to understand / reproduce at all.

You could maybe default to latest and default to restoring to ".", but that carries some risks. This is only as complex as necessary.

> this command shouldn't be hard to understand

I understand the command, I'm just questioning the example if they want to do some positive marketing for the tool. Something simple like the following gives the same information but is much more understandable than unnecessarily convoluted directory names.

    restic -r /backups/restic restore latest --target /home/dewey --include /home/dewey/myfile.txt

The real world isn't neat and tidy though.

I commend his real example "* From my recent .bash_history".

If someone is intimidated by paths in the CLI, the tool isn't for them. Appropriate solutions and their value is relative. Better to be realistic and honest than push people to adopt something they may struggle with.

Besides, this is HN.

Either you do not understand the meaning of hard or you have a very quirky way of trying to be sarcastic :)

“oh come on please it's easy just /etc/init.apt-get/frob-set-conf --arc=0 - +/lib/syn.${SETDCONPATH}.so.4.2 even my grandma can do that”

> borg (vorta)

So that's like an assimilated Weyoun or what?

Offtopic, but this has reminded me that allegedly some of the more obscure star trek novels actually did do some kind of borg-meets-dominion crossover.

(and on the seventh day, the devops nerd didst look upon his backups, said "this is good", and enjoyed a trashy scifi book)

Were there assimilated Founders? A drone changeling?

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