We're very pleased to present you restic 0.12.1! restic is distributed as a standalone binary: download the correct file for your operating system and architecture, extract the file and just run it. If you run into any issues, please report them at the GitHub issue tracker or visit the forum. If you already have restic >= 0.9.4, you can use restic self-update to get the latest version in a secure way.

The binaries released with each restic version are reproducible, which means that you can reproduce a byte identical version from the source code for that release. Instructions on how to do that in the Developer Documentation.

Changelog for restic 0.12.1 (2021-08-03)

The following sections list the changes in restic 0.12.1 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.

Summary

• Fix #2742: Improve error handling for rclone and REST backend over HTTP2
• Fix #3111: Fix terminal output redirection for PowerShell
• Fix #3214: Treat an empty password as a fatal error for repository init
• Fix #3267: copy failed to copy snapshots in rare cases
• Fix #3184: backup --quiet no longer prints status information
• Fix #3296: Fix crash of check --read-data-subset=x% run for an empty repository
• Fix #3302: Fix fdopendir: not a directory error for local backend
• Fix #3334: Print created new cache message only on a terminal
• Fix #3380: Fix crash of backup --exclude='**'
• Fix #3305: Fix possibly missing backup summary of JSON output in case of error
• Fix #3439: Correctly handle download errors during restore
• Chg #3247: Empty files now have size of 0 in ls --json output
• Enh #2780: Add release binaries for s390x architecture on Linux
• Enh #3293: Add --repository-file2 option to init and copy command
• Enh #3312: Add auto-completion support for fish
• Enh #3336: SFTP backend now checks for disk space
• Enh #3377: Add release binaries for Apple Silicon
• Enh #3414: Add --keep-within-hourly option to restic forget
• Enh #3456: Support filtering and specifying untagged snapshots
• Enh #3167: Allow specifying limit of snapshots list
• Enh #3426: Optimize read performance of mount command
• Enh #3427: find --pack fallback to index if data file is missing

Details

• Bugfix #2742: Improve error handling for rclone and REST backend over HTTP2

  When retrieving data from the rclone / REST backend while also using HTTP2 restic did not detect when no data was returned at all. This could cause for example the check command to report the following error:

  Pack ID does not match, want [...], got e3b0c442

  This has been fixed by correctly detecting and retrying the incomplete download.

  #2742 #3453 https://forum.restic.net/t/http2-stream-closed-connection-reset-context-canceled/3743/10

• Bugfix #3111: Fix terminal output redirection for PowerShell

  When redirecting the output of restic using PowerShell on Windows, the output contained terminal escape characters. This has been fixed by properly detecting the terminal type.

  In addition, the mintty terminal now shows progress output for the backup command.

  #3111 #3325

• Bugfix #3214: Treat an empty password as a fatal error for repository init

  When attempting to initialize a new repository, if an empty password was supplied, the repository would be created but the init command would return an error with a stack trace. Now, if an empty password is provided, it is treated as a fatal error, and no repository is created.

  #3214 #3283

• Bugfix #3267: copy failed to copy snapshots in rare cases

  The copy command could in rare cases fail with the error message SaveTree(...) returned unexpected id .... This has been fixed.

  On Linux/BSDs, the error could be caused by backing up symlinks with non-UTF-8 target paths. Note that, due to limitations in the repository format, these are not stored properly and should be avoided if possible.

  #3267 #3310

• Bugfix #3184: backup --quiet no longer prints status information

  A regression in the latest restic version caused the output of backup --quiet to contain large amounts of backup progress information when run using an interactive terminal. This is fixed now.

  A workaround for this bug is to run restic as follows: restic backup --quiet [..] | cat -.

  #3184 #3186

• Bugfix #3296: Fix crash of check --read-data-subset=x% run for an empty repository

  The command restic check --read-data-subset=x% crashed when run for an empty repository. This has been fixed.

  #3296 #3309

• Bugfix #3302: Fix fdopendir: not a directory error for local backend

  The check, list packs, prune and rebuild-index commands failed for the local backend when the data folder in the repository contained files. This has been fixed.

  #3302 #3308

• Bugfix #3334: Print created new cache message only on a terminal

  The message created new cache was printed even when the output wasn't a terminal. That broke piping restic dump output to tar or zip if cache directory didn't exist. The message is now only printed on a terminal.

  #3334 #3343

• Bugfix #3380: Fix crash of backup --exclude='**'

  The exclude filter **, which excludes all files, caused restic to crash. This has been corrected.

  #3380 #3393

• Bugfix #3305: Fix possibly missing backup summary of JSON output in case of error

  When using --json output it happened from time to time that the summary output was missing in case an error occurred. This has been fixed.

  #3305

• Bugfix #3439: Correctly handle download errors during restore

  Due to a regression in restic 0.12.0, the restore command in some cases did not retry download errors and only printed a warning. This has been fixed by retrying incomplete data downloads.

  #3439 #3449

• Change #3247: Empty files now have size of 0 in ls --json output

  The ls --json command used to omit the sizes of empty files in its output. It now reports a size of zero explicitly for regular files, while omitting the size field for all other types.

  #3247 #3257

• Enhancement #2780: Add release binaries for s390x architecture on Linux

  We've added release binaries for Linux using the s390x architecture.

  #2780 #3452

• Enhancement #3293: Add --repository-file2 option to init and copy command

  The init and copy command can now be used with the --repository-file2 option or the $RESTIC_REPOSITORY_FILE2 environment variable. These to options are in addition to the --repo2 flag and allow you to read the destination repository from a file.

  Using both --repository-file and --repo2 options resulted in an error for the copy or init command. The handling of this combination of options has been fixed. A workaround for this issue is to only use --repo or -r and --repo2 for init or copy.

  #3293 #3294

• Enhancement #3312: Add auto-completion support for fish

  The generate command now supports fish auto completion.

  #3312

• Enhancement #3336: SFTP backend now checks for disk space

  Backing up over SFTP previously spewed multiple generic "failure" messages when the remote disk was full. It now checks for disk space before writing a file and fails immediately with a "no space left on device" message.

  #3336 #3345

• Enhancement #3377: Add release binaries for Apple Silicon

  We've added release binaries for macOS on Apple Silicon (M1).

  #3377 #3394

• Enhancement #3414: Add --keep-within-hourly option to restic forget

  The forget command allowed keeping a given number of hourly backups or to keep all backups within a given interval, but it was not possible to specify keeping hourly backups within a given interval.

  The new --keep-within-hourly option now offers this functionality. Similar options for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly are also implemented, the new options are:

  --keep-within-hourly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-daily <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-weekly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-monthly <1y2m3d4h> --keep-within-yearly <1y2m3d4h>

  #3414 #3416 https://forum.restic.net/t/forget-policy/4014/11

• Enhancement #3456: Support filtering and specifying untagged snapshots

  It was previously not possible to specify an empty tag with the --tag and --keep-tag options. This has now been fixed, such that --tag '' and --keep-tag '' now matches snapshots without tags. This allows e.g. the snapshots and forget commands to only operate on untagged snapshots.

  #3456 #3457

• Enhancement #3167: Allow specifying limit of snapshots list

  The --last option allowed limiting the output of the snapshots command to the latest snapshot for each host. The new --latest n option allows limiting the output to the latest n snapshots.

  This change deprecates the option --last in favour of --latest 1.

  #3167

• Enhancement #3426: Optimize read performance of mount command

  Reading large files in a mounted repository may be up to five times faster. This improvement primarily applies to repositories stored at a backend that can be accessed with low latency, like e.g. the local backend.

  #3426

• Enhancement #3427: find --pack fallback to index if data file is missing

  When investigating a repository with missing data files, it might be useful to determine affected snapshots before running rebuild-index. Previously, find --pack pack-id returned no data as it required accessing the data file. Now, if the necessary data is still available in the repository index, it gets retrieved from there.

  The command now also supports looking up multiple pack files in a single find run.

  #3427 https://forum.restic.net/t/missing-packs-not-found/2600