Hot and cold repo?

[KamikazeePL]

Could somebody explain me hot and cold repo terms.
The best answer would be with examples.

[aawsome]

see e.g. https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic/blob/main/config/ovh-hot-cold.toml which is basically what I am using for my personal backups.

rclone:ovh:backup-home in this case points to a rclone config which uses OVH Cloud Archive, see https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/cloud-archive/. Note that this is a cheap storage but has access restrictions and also charges for access. Basically a typical example for what I would call cold storage.

rclone:ovh:backup-home-hot in this case points to a rclone config which uses OVH Object Storage, see https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/object-storage/. This is a standard object storage which allows easy direkt access, like AWS S3.

For OVH Cloud Archive, if I try to access an object, it will fail but immedately warm up the object. When I retry after the warm-up-time, the object is directly accessible by rclone. So I set warm-up = true and specify a reasonable warm-up time.

That's basically all. Now the commands which really need to access the cold storage will automatically warm-up the needed objects and wait for them before proceeding. Note that all metadata is also saved in the hot repo, so many commands won't even need a warm-up but work as usual.

You can see statistics of the cold and hot part using repoinfo and check will also check consistency of hot/cold repository. In any case, the cold part contains a full and normal repository, so you can always just transfer that to a "normal" storage and keep accessing/using this as a normal repository from that time on.

[simonsan]

We should add this to the FAQ I feel!