Yesterday, I saved some data to Backblaze B2 using Restic as a backup program. Today I wanted to make sure that I could do a restore.
Restic offers normal restores where you undump a whole backup, or a single file from that backup. But unusual to me was the option to mount your backup system as a FUSE filesystem.
The Restic docs can be found under the heading restore using mount
restic -r b2:emv-restic-backupfiles mount $HOME/OldFiles
The idea here is that FUSE (a "filesystem in user space") gives you a mount point on a remote machine, serving up a user view of a filesystem. This means you can do everything you'd normally do with a remotely mounted filesystem - cd, ls, grep, find - and the operations will be translated into Restic restore operations.
For mounting your backups and poking around to see what's there it's great - very reminiscent of Apple's "Time Machine" style restore process.
There are warnings that when you are done with your mount you need to be careful to unmount it with umount in some circumstances:
fusermount -u $HOME/OldFiles
Some additional reading:
man 1 restic-mount- Restic issue 1331, "fuse mount: mounting without user interaction"
- Jeet Sukumaran, You Are Only as Good as Your Next Resurrection - using various Restic restore options
- LabSrc, Restic: the backup you should be using, 2019
- Backblaze help, How to configure Backblaze B2 with Restic on Linux, setup instructions.
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