A few of my backup repositories point at a 7 day rotating database dump directory. Each day, a dump of each database is written to /mnt/backup/database/YYYY/MM/DD/HH/II.

Originally I had restic backing up /mnt/backup/database, but that included 7 full copies of all data in each backup. Whilst redundancy is nice, this means a restore takes much longer than a restore of a single copy and there is seven times the data recovery and transfer charge.

I though I was smart by linking /mnt/backup/database/YYYY/MM/DD/HH/II to /mnt/backup/database/current, but in that scenario restic only backs up the symlink. Fast, but not helpful ;-)

I have a solution now that only backs up single copies of data by backing up /mnt/backup/database/current/* but that means a list of all database dumps is used by restic as the backup path. It also means that when I add or delete a database, the path changes and the expiry jobs see the snapshot with the different path as a new snapshot.

That leaves me with way more data stored offsite than is strictly necessary and thus a higher storage bill.

It would be wonderfully helpful if restic had an option to dereference symlinks, so I could point it at /mnt/backup/database/current and have it backup the contents of the directory that links points at.