Creating snapshots

Now we’re ready to backup some data. The contents of a directory at a specific point in time is called a “snapshot” in rustic. Run the following command and enter the repository password you chose above again:

$ rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo --verbose backup ~/work
open repository
enter password for repository:
password is correct
lock repository
load index files
start scan
start backup
scan finished in 1.837s
processed 1.720 GiB in 0:12
Files:        5307 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:         1867 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Added:      1.200 GiB
snapshot 40dc1520 saved

As you can see, rustic created a backup of the directory and was pretty fast! The specific snapshot just created is identified by a sequence of hexadecimal characters, 40dc1520 in this case.

You can see that rustic tells us it processed 1.720 GiB of data, this is the size of the files and directories in ~/work on the local file system. It also tells us that only 1.200 GiB was added to the repository. This means that some of the data was duplicate and rustic was able to efficiently reduce it.

If you don’t pass the --verbose option, rustic will print less data. You’ll still get a nice live status display. Be aware that the live status shows the processed files and not the transferred data. Transferred volume might be lower (due to de-duplication) or higher.

If you run the backup command again, rustic will create another snapshot of your data, but this time it’s even faster and no new data was added to the repository (since all data is already there). This is de-duplication at work!

$ rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo --verbose backup ~/work
open repository
enter password for repository:
password is correct
lock repository
load index files
using parent snapshot d875ae93
start scan
start backup
scan finished in 1.881s
processed 1.720 GiB in 0:03
Files:           0 new,     0 changed,  5307 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,     0 changed,  1867 unmodified
Added:      0 B
snapshot 79766175 saved

You can even backup individual files in the same repository (not passing --verbose means less output):

$ rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo backup ~/work.txt
enter password for repository:
password is correct
snapshot 249d0210 saved

Now is a good time to run rustic check to verify that all data is properly stored in the repository. You should run this command regularly to make sure the internal structure of the repository is free of errors.