Backing up photos with restic

2026-07-12

Photos are the only data at home that would genuinely hurt to lose, so they get the most boring setup I could come up with.

restic -r /mnt/backup/photos backup ~/Pictures --exclude-caches
restic -r /mnt/backup/photos forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 8 --keep-monthly 12 --prune

The same repository is synced weekly to a second location. Once a month I restore a random folder to a temporary directory and open a few files. A backup you have never restored is only a hope.

Things that bit me

• Forgetting to exclude thumbnail caches doubled the first snapshot.
• The spare disk went to sleep mid-backup; a udev rule fixed that.

← All notes