Removing files and restic repair

[grifferz]

Let's say I've done a backup with rustic backup and found some files in it that shouldn't be in it. As far as I can see there's no way currently with rustic to remove those files, right? Just have to make sure they are excluded from future backups and remove entire existing snapshot(s).

restic rewrite can remove files from snapshots with --exclude, but when used on a snapshot from rustic gives the error:

snapshot 0767ff9c of [etc] at 2025-08-21 19:34:51.94643089 +0000 UTC by @foo.example.com
Fatal: unable to rewrite snapshot ID "0767ff9c": cannot encode tree at "/" without losing information

I see from restic's forum that this seems to be a well known issue of restic not being able to operate on the additional metadata added by rustic.

In that forum thread it is suggested to use restic repair snapshots … to make it so that restic would be able to rewrite that snapshot to remove the files, and that is also in the restic documentation, but someone in that thread who did that ended up with a repository that is then unusable by rustic.

That thread is from August 2024. Is it now safe to use restic repair on a snapshot added by rustic? What repercussions would there be?

Or have I perhaps overlooked a way to remove files with rustic?

Thanks,
Andy

[aawsome]

@grifferz Thanks for your question!

Yes, the rewrite command is not yet implemented in rustic.

About the problem when using a restic snapshot (either generated by restic snapshots or restic rewrite): This should be long solved.

So, for you case using restic repair and restic rewrite should do the job - it may just loose some metadata of the snapshots. (but not dir metadata)

[grifferz]

Thanks. I will try this out as let you know how I get on, once I have resolved my full repository issue!