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Looking Inside

A repository you cannot inspect is a black box you are trusting. These are the inspection commands, all run in the lab against the two-snapshot repository of chapter 6 (transcript t04).

The list of snapshots

restic snapshots

ID        Time                 Host   Tags   Paths        Size
c81c812b  2026-10-24 04:07:52         ...    field-notes  12.000 MiB
997db8dc  2026-10-24 04:07:58         ...    field-notes  20.000 MiB

Every command that takes a snapshot accepts the short ID, a full ID, or the word latest — the newest snapshot matching whatever other filters you gave (host, path, tags). latest is convenient in conversation and dangerous in scripts you wrote months ago; chapter 12's recipes still use it, with their filters written tightly enough to deserve it.

Filters worth knowing: --host, --path, --tag narrow the list (and what latest means) to the snapshots you actually run a schedule for.

Walking a snapshot

restic ls latest
restic ls latest /path/inside/the/snapshot

ls prints the snapshot's tree: full original paths, files only as names — the contents stay in the repository until you restore or dump them:

restic dump latest /path/to/one/file

prints a single file to standard output. For finding rather than browsing:

restic find shed-key.txt

answers with every snapshot containing a matching name and the path inside it — the command you want at the moment someone says "I deleted it on Tuesday, I think".

Comparing two snapshots

restic diff <older-id> <newer-id>

M for modified, + added, - removed, for files and directories, ending with the blob arithmetic of chapter 6: how much data the newer snapshot actually added. Diff is also the cheapest integrity habit available — run it between last night's snapshot and tonight's, and a backup that suddenly "changed" 40,000 files you never touch is a story you hear from restic first.

How big, in which sense

restic stats            # restore-size: snapshots at face value
restic stats --mode raw-data
restic stats latest     # one snapshot, either mode

Chapter 6 explained the two senses: restore-size for planning a restore, raw-data for planning a disk. A third mode, files-by-contents, counts unique file contents — the number that tells you how much of your archive is the same photograph kept in five folders.