Does restic do this?
Since I have a directory full of these logs, I can search for deleted files by doing something like 'grep "^- " restic-diff-*.log'
I'm not sure if there's a better way to do this, but it works pretty well for me.
$ restic mount --repo /mnt/backupdrive/myrepo /mnt/backedup
$ echo /mnt/backedup/snapshots/*/path/to/file
If you don't know the path, I don't know how long `find -type f` takes so you might be right about that being inefficient. It is certainly not a use-case that I think restic ever had in mind.
I also don't know of "backup" software to solve this, it seems a bit out of scope for most of them (they are meant to have a backup copy of your disk, not be a file manager with history). You might have more luck with tools like rsync (or Toucan, from the good old days where I used Windows and Portable Apps), those can certainly create only new files and never delete deleted files, but then you typically don't get encryption and deduplication.
I haven’t yet moved to restic, so it might be that find -f is good enough for me.
Yes, a backup tool never deletes by itself, but the standard way of using such tools is that you keep the last n snapshots - this is just delayed sync.
I don't know anything about backup architectures, but is it possible to be more efficient with storage and indexing(for search) if your use-case includes finding files from 5 years ago, but not necessarily recreate the whole filesystem as it was on some date?
Restic, Kopia and most other modern backup solutions allow you to to define the retention policy. Usually by specifying how many hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly snapshots to keep. They don't just remove all snapshots that are older than n.
They also usually let you restore any given file, from any given snapshot, without having to restore everything. And as long as there's a functional index, this shouldn't be terribly slow either.
If a file existed for 3 days and was then deleted, it might make it to 3 daily snapshots, and no weekly, monthly or yearly snapshot.
Even if you’re lucky and the snapshots are not deleted, if you don’t remember when the file existed, currently you need to search through all snapshots. There’s no index or any data structure to speed this search up.
I agree, restoring is fast once you’ve found the file.
Currently I use backblaze, and it does have infinite retention and snapshots, and restoring is fast. But I’m looking to migrate to something that gives me search as well.