Restic support for finding files and mounting backups
Suggestion
There are two amazing Restic features which would elevate Deja Dup to the next level:
- Restic natively supports mounting backups as filesystem folders, so that the user can use Nautilus or other explorers to find their files, preview their contents, open them (read-only), look at properties such as filesizes, etc. This is super helpful when restoring files while you're looking for the correct version.
- Restic also supports the
restic find
command, which allows users to do advanced searches such as "Find a file named work.pdf that's between 2 and 4 weeks old". It then scans all backups/snapshots to look for the file, and gives you a list of snapshots that contain it. This helps the user find the exact snapshot that had the file they need.
Combining both features inside Deja Dup, would enable a workflow of "find the latest version of my work.pdf" and then clicking one of the discovered (matching) snapshots, to mount the backup on disk and then trigger an xdg-open to the exact folder of the backup that contains the selected file/version.
Currently, Deja Dup's backup restoration requires users to manually navigate its proprietary file icon grid, which doesn't have any file manager features (no timestamps, no filesizes, etc) or previews (no way to open files in an editor to see their contents and confirm it before restoring from backup), and also requires users to manually click through every backed up snapshots to try to find the file. At least Deja Dup has a really nice per-snapshot "search" field which can find files, which alleviates some of the difficulty of finding backed up files.
However, for now, I have personally decided to switch to PikaBackup (Borg) which supports mounting backups as folders, since that's currently the only solution to preview files before restoring them. I don't mean anything by it and I think that Deja Dup is a beautiful application, with a bright future thanks to its Restic backend! Restic is definitely better than Borg, but lacks any good GUIs. Deja Dup is well on the way to filling that need. :)