Ignore some backup errors

[vnghia]

Hello, I want to mark the resticprofile backup as success if the error is snapsnot is empty. I would like to ask if the run-after-fail could be used to do this ? since I don't think it could change the status of the whole command. If it can not, is there any other method I could use to achive this or I will have to wrap resticprofile backup inside a shell script.

Thank you very much for resticprofile. I really enjoy using it!

[creativeprojects]

How do you get this error snapshot is empty? How does it happen? I couldn't reproduce it 🤔

I'm trying to see if restic would return a specific exit code in that case (although it's not listed here)

[vnghia]

well it is here restic/restic#3760. Basically you encounter it on an empty folder. Since I use resticprofile in a scheduled way, I dont really care if the folder is empty or not and it should just success if there are no other error

[creativeprojects]

Got it! The snapshot has to be entirely empty, meaning you want to backup the current empty directory.

Sadly restic is returning a generic error code 1:

repository 0d459c1f opened (version 2, compression level auto)
using parent snapshot b34053d5
load index files
[0:00] 100.00%  2 / 2 index files loaded
start scan on [./]
start backup on [./]
scan finished in 0.005s: 0 files, 0 B
Fatal: unable to save snapshot: snapshot is empty
2025/11/16 16:46:44 backup on profile 'empty': exit status 1
exit status 1

Instead of starting your backup directly on the directory you want to backup, start it a level before.
Your backup source will be the name of the directory instead of . or ./. This way, the snapshot will always contain a minimum of 1 empty directory. That's one item in the snapshot 👍🏻

As you can see:

open repository
repository 0d459c1f opened (version 2, compression level auto)
using parent snapshot b34053d5
load index files
[0:00] 100.00%  2 / 2 index files loaded
start scan on [empty]
start backup on [empty]
scan finished in 0.005s: 0 files, 0 B

Files:           0 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,     0 changed,     1 unmodified
Data Blobs:      0 new
Tree Blobs:      0 new
Added to the repository: 0 B   (0 B   stored)

processed 0 files, 0 B in 0:00
snapshot 23b4c48f saved
2025/11/16 16:52:01 profile 'empty': finished 'backup'

[vnghia]

That's a very good idea. Thank you!