Thanks for your quick reply.
I tried to connect to the repo but it appears that there is a ssh problem for subprocess:

subprocess ssh: Host key verification failed. Fatal: create repository at sftp:NAME@ADDRESS://REPO failed: Fatal: unable to open repository at sftp:NAME@ADDRESS://REPO: unable to start the sftp session, error: error receiving version packet from server: server unexpectedly closed connection: unexpected EOF

If I am trying from CLI the command restic -r sftp:NAME@ADDRESS://REP snapshots it connects properly and I get the snapshot list
Based on the printed error, I assume there is a problem with the subprocess on the docker's web server.

Reading your document sI see that you mention that one / works better than // . I tried one / and the error is identical

I think that for debugging purposes these should be a way to test restic directly, such like a dialog box where commands are passed to a terminal where we can enter commands like restic -r sftp:NAME@ADDRESS:/REPO snapshot

I gave up on sftp and I mounted the NAS with NFS. I was able to "add" the repository but I I don't see much in the Backrest window. The Tree is empty and I was expecting to see the repository tree, but after issuing several commands I realized that is more like a history of commands rather than the result of running them. Not very intuitive especially since the documentation is very limited.

After finally adding the repository I saw the "command" button. I ran the simple command "snapshots" and the command output is "command: /bin/restic-0.17.1 snapshots -o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes"
I see 2 problems here:

• I was expecting to see something like this in the command output:

ID        Time                 Host        Tags        Paths
------------------------------------------------------------
43e400e4  2020-08-04 17:08:47  rpbi48gb                /
ff8faa0e  2020-08-24 16:20:22  rpbi48gb                /
80d86e35  2020-09-13 21:34:14  rpbi48gb                /
8de14c5c  2020-10-06 23:59:06  rpbi48gb                /
...
------------------------------------------------------------

• why are the following arguments added "-o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes"

Also, it appears that there is no way to do a backup unless you have a "Plan". I prefer doing manual backups.

It seems that you have a very nice project, but due to my limited time and lack of extensive documentation I am unable to make something useful out of it, I was hoping for something more user-friendly where I connect to the repo and can browse the files, extract files, start manual backups. Maybe it is possible with this software, but as I said with my limited time and lack of detailed documentation I can't. Thanks.

Sorry you’re having trouble, the docs on the wiki cover much of this first time setup, https://garethgeorge.github.io/backrest .

It sounds like you are looking for the “index snapshots” button which reads the repo and imports your snapshots if you’re not using a plan to automate backups.

You can certainly just run manual backups using the “run command” button and then index them with “index snapshots” to see stats and browse files.

I am expecting to see something like seen in the attached. It took 2 min to get those results

I think what’s probably happening for you is that backrest created a new repo and isn’t seeing anything in it — probably because of a slight typo in the URI or similar.

I think you have a good point that there’s a lot that can be confusing here, just tried this on a new laptop and it can be tricky to notice as backrest happily just initializes the repo for you if it doesn’t exist.

I’ll file a bug to take a look at showing a “confirmation” or similar before ever initializes a new repo.

Hmm, Backrest should not be running init on your repo if it already exists, it first runs restic cat config per the docs https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/075_scripting.html#check-if-a-repository-is-already-initialized here to check if a repo is already initialized at the configured location.

I agree though that either way, I think you're right it's confusing that backrest will implicitly initialize without making it clear it's doing this.

I'm curious -- using the Run Command feature with snapshots do you see any output at all? From your initial bug it sounds like perhaps not? You also asked a question there about -o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes -- this is a default arg backrest adds which applies to sftp users. It disables any interactive prompting from sftp i.e. waiting for a password over stdin. I'd also add that SFTP setup is much easier when not using docker (i.e. a bare metal install). I am considering disabling it or adding warnings for docker users due to the number of relatively difficult footguns around correctly mounting ssh keys into your container (with the right ownership and permissions) and getting them to be detected by the ssh subprocess forked by restic.

Thanks for the very detailed process of adapting old snapshots to be viewed in backrest. However, this process requires a lot of steps and time, which I don't think that I am going to do since I already have a guy tool "restic browser" that sees the CLI created backups.
Second, I wanted to use the backrest docker, which has a major problem with SFTP, which disqualified it for me to use.
Third, I expect when I connect to the repo to see all the snapshots without any interventions, it should be fully compatible with the CLI.

I like the fact that I can use a web interface but I am not going to use it until full compatibility with CLI, and SFTP are fixed.

Thanks again

Thanks @quanltt for the detailed writeup, that's a great list of steps for importing existing snapshots into backrest's tag system. It's honestly something I'd love to add some GUI support for eventually, but in the meantime I'm also very happy to hear / see that it's relatively straight forward with the Run Command feature :).

Re: backrest support, I do again want to clarify that backrest is fully compatible with the restic CLI (and has test coverage to this effect) and existing repositories. Something is incorrectly configured when you attempt to import your snapshots, and I strongly suspect you've accidentally created a new empty repository somewhere which is why you see no errors and also don't see your data. In #582 I've added a new button to make it easier to detect this sort of situation.

SFTP is supported in backrest docker, but requires some amount of work as it would with any docker container as you must correctly mount your key files into the container with appropriate permissions and provide them to backrest. #278 includes some detailed discussion of what's needed for setup. It's not clear to me that you've taken debugging steps to correct your SSH setup in your docker environment, if you expect things to "just work" a baremetal install is easier here.

Agreed it would be great to make these flows a bit easier, there are a number of inherent foot guns when setting up SSH in a docker container, but these do work today.