reclaiming space from restic backups

restic -r /path/to/restic-repo snapshots
# List of snapshots
restic -r /path/to/repo forget <SNAPSHOT_ID>

I’d been cleaning up old snapshots generated by Restic when I realized I wasn’t getting any space back. So I consulted the docs.

It turns out, you need to use the prune command to remove unused data:

du -hs ./restic-repo/*
4.0K    ./restic-repo/config
31G     ./restic-repo/data
3.5M    ./restic-repo/index
8.0K    ./restic-repo/keys
4.0K    ./restic-repo/locks
32K     ./restic-repo/snapshots

restic -r /path/to/restic-repo prune

du -hs ./restic-repo/*
4.0K    ./restic-repo/config
28G     ./restic-repo/data
1.9M    ./restic-repo/index
8.0K    ./restic-repo/keys
4.0K    ./restic-repo/locks
32K     ./restic-repo/snapshots

Seems like you can use prune as a flag when you’re removing snapshots (which is probably what I’ll be doing in the future):

restic forget --keep-last 1 --prune

References

• Removing backup snapshots