Is restoration of an older kopia version snapshot supported after upgrading to the latest version?

Support
1

Hello,
I am confused regarding the compatibility matrix and the support on various snapshots taken at different versions of kopia instance at different time gaps. Specifically,
assume that I had taken a snapshot 6 months back using version 0.x.y of kopia and today if I want to restore that old version snapshot using current latest version of kopia 1.p.q or 1.x.y.

  1. Will this be supported or will it break due to mismatches in versions of kopia runtime?
  2. Does this mean I need to use the same version of kopia to do both backup(snapshot) and restore operations at different time gaps.
  3. Related to Snapshot integrity while in transit over the network for snapshotting or restoration to remote network hosts/servers, how does kopia ensure integrity of the data in transit?
  4. Is upgrade to latest kopia version always needed if compatibility matrix has concerns on cross version snapshotting/restoration operations?

Please help me understand this better since this is key to ensure smooth restoration when we work on huge data sized backups on production servers.

2

I know only of one single instance, where a new Kopia version introduced some changes to the repo and back then, Kopia handled the transformation all on its own, after being instructed to do so.

The snapshots themselves have always been accesible, no matter the version Kopia was at. Afair, Jarek hinted at some major changes in the repo structure, but those wouldn’t happen, if Kopia would not be able to ensure the compatibility with older snapshots, so I really think, that you can rest assured about that concern.

3

Yes, so far all kopia versions have been backwards compatible - repositories created in all versions are restorable using the latest one. It does not always work in reverse, but does in a number of cases.

At some point I want to deprecate old index format, which is when we’ll upgrade old repositories to the new format and this should still hold true.

In other words, there are no plans to drop compatibility any time soon.

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