Printing files to stdout

Sometimes it’s helpful to print files to stdout so that other programs can read the data directly. This can be achieved by using the dump command, like this:

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo dump latest production.sql | mysql

If you have saved multiple different things into the same repo, the latest snapshot may not be the right one. For example, consider the following snapshots in a repo:

$ rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo snapshots
ID        Date                 Host        Tags        Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
562bfc5e  2018-07-14 20:18:01  mopped                  /home/user/file1
bbacb625  2018-07-14 20:18:07  mopped                  /home/other/work
e922c858  2018-07-14 20:18:10  mopped                  /home/other/work
098db9d5  2018-07-14 20:18:13  mopped                  /production.sql
b62f46ec  2018-07-14 20:18:16  mopped                  /home/user/file1
1541acae  2018-07-14 20:18:18  mopped                  /home/other/work
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Here, rustic would resolve latest to the snapshot 1541acae, which does not contain the file we’d like to print at all (production.sql). In this case, you can pass rustic the snapshot ID of the snapshot you like to restore:

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo dump 098db9d5 production.sql | mysql

Or you can pass rustic a path that should be used for selecting the latest snapshot. The path must match the patch printed in the “Directory” column, e.g.:

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo dump --path /production.sql latest production.sql | mysql

It is also possible to dump the contents of a whole folder structure to stdout. To retain the information about the files and folders rustic will output the contents in the tar (default) or zip format:

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo dump latest /home/other/work > restore.tar

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo dump -a zip latest /home/other/work > restore.zip