fuse mount: mounting without user interaction

[mungomat]

Currently mounting a restic repository is started via 'restic mount' and after mounting restic waits for the user to hit control-c.
You can however unmount it on a different terminal with 'fusermount -u'. In this case restic stops with 'unable to umount (maybe already umounted?): exit status 1: fusermount: entry for /mnt/restic not found in /etc/mtab'

This is in contrast to other mounting mechanisms where you have one program for mounting and another for unmounting.

Wouldn't it be better to have 'restic mount' and 'restic unmount'?

[fd0]

Yes, good idea, at least for mount that's rather easy: Start restic in a subprocess and exit the main process.

[darioseidl]

Hi,
I'm new to restic and currently evaluating it. It looks really promising!
I was quite confused by the mount command, I assumed there was a bug and it was hanging/sleeping here:

sudo restic -r /mnt/backup/restic-local/ mount /mnt/restic/
enter password for repository: 
Now serving the repository at /mnt/restic/
Don't forget to umount after quitting!

Just to confirm, this is expected behavior, i.e. it is done mounting at this point and it is save to stop the process with Ctrl+C?

[fd0]

Yes, that's the expected behavior (at least for now).

[darioseidl]

Okay, thanks for confirming. All good.

As you can guess, I agree that an unmount command would be nicer.

[darioseidl]

I'm back at using restic and remembered this (and saw that it was still open).

I think the easiest way to avoid confusion would be to add an example to the documentation showing how to safely mount and unmount in one shell:

Run restic mount in the background (with &):

$ restic -r /tmp/backup mount /mnt/restic &
enter password for repository:
Now serving /tmp/backup at /tmp/restic
Don't forget to umount after quitting!

Do some work with the mounted backup:

$ ls /mnt/restic/snapshots/latest/
...

Send SIGINT to restic to unmount:

$ pkill -2 restic

That's the way I do it at least.

[mholt]

FWIW, I've been automating restic mount for a while now with no problems. Simply signal it when you're done to unmount it (as you suggested above).