[dividuum]

You could use one of those services that expect a regular http heartbeat. I'm personally using uptimerobot for that. Within a .bat or .sh file, add a

  restic [...] && curl <heartbeat-url>

and you'll get eventually notified if backup jobs fails too often.

[Saris]

I've tinkered with that using healthchecks, but I don't really trust that I know what I'm doing when setting it up.

Restic is also confusing to me with forgetting snapshots and doing cleanup, I don't understand why that isn't run as part of the backup (or is it? The docs aren't clear).

[deckard1]

no, you have to run "restic forget" with the policy you want (keep last X, last monthly Y, etc.) followed up with a "restic prune". Or you can pass "--prune" to the "forget" command I think.

You don't always want to forget/prune snapshots. Especially if you're using a cloud service like B2. It can easily cost you more to prune than actual storage costs if you're not careful.

See here: https://www.seanh.cc/2022/04/03/restic/#maintaining-your-bac...

and

https://kdecherf.com/blog/2018/12/28/restic-and-backblaze-b2...

[Saris]

Thanks for the links! That's helpful, the part about B2 makes sense.