Questions about multiple repositories and tags

General
1

Hello!

Found Kopia a few days ago and it’s been great! Thanks for this wonderful software. Really fits with how my brain works and I love how policies are built in. So coming from restic, I have some questions about using multiple repositories and how tags work.

So my first question about using multiple repository is:
How do you use these with the cli syntax? I’m not clear on how to select a repository when I’m doing a snapshot create and I want one on let’s say a local file system and another one on my B2 bucket. Or possibly I want the same paths on both repositories but I want them to be distinct backups (IE: not identical copies of a backup)

I found this thread: How to specify destination repository in the "snapshot create" command for consistent results? (and auto-create the repo if it doesn't exist) but I’m not sure it quite fits the use case I’m trying to do. As I don’t need Kopia to auto create the repository on command, I just want to be able to select which repository I am using when I run a snapshot create. If I don’t specify a configuration file when I create my local file system repository, will it still have a distinct configuration file that I can point to for the commands to work against? Or is there a more elegant way of doing this with cli syntax or environment variables?

Second question is on tags:
I haven’t been able to find any documentation on how these are meant to look, or what their actual use case is. I come from restic and it uses tags to put a human readable name to something that is traditionally a path or a long new UUID for a snapshot. Is that the intent of tags here as well? I’m not sure they’re meant to be used too heavily as I don’t see any documentation regarding them, or any usage examples. I’d appreciate if you could elaborate on this.

Thanks!
Brandon

2

I am also a beginner to kopia. Actually,

  • you first create a repository
  • then connect to a repository
  • when connected you may create snapshots (backups) of something
  • in the end you may disconnect

Example with a local repository

kopia repository create filesystem --path /kopia
kopia repository connect  filesystem --path /kopia
kopia snapshot create /home
kopia repository disconnect
1 Like
3

@manfredlotz Heh turns out the link I posted DOES explain my questions for #1 as it turns out unless you specify configuration file names vis the flag it can’t coexist with multiple repositories. Makes sense and is easily solved using configuration files and shell aliases to do the appropriate actions on the repo.

My question on tags remain though. What’s the expected format and how are they used in kopia.

Thanks,
Brandon