Output of restic version

restic 0.9.6 compiled with go1.12.12 on linux/amd64

What should restic do differently? Which functionality do you think we should add?

A restic command like backup or forget should have an option like --max-retries or --max-retry-count after which it will stop retrying the activity.

What are you trying to do? What problem would this solve?

When using restic with a restic rest-server backend, the server can be configured to be "append-only", i.e. backup is allowed but forget is not. If I then try restic forget, I get:

repository … opened successfully, password is correct
Remove(<snapshot/703fc2e649>) returned error, retrying after 409.996243ms: blob not removed, server response: 403 Forbidden (403)
Remove(<snapshot/703fc2e649>) returned error, retrying after 907.654304ms: blob not removed, server response: 403 Forbidden (403)
…

With the proposed option, the command would fail after n retries and not try any longer.

Did restic help you today? Did it make you happy in any way?

Restic is awesome! I really is backups done right: encrypted, deduplicated, extremely fast, so many backends, open source, wow. The speed and small size really impresses me. I had to double check if a new snapshot really contained all the large files, I changed.