Hi Everyone,
I have been using restic to back up my system (running 22.04.5) without issue until this week, when I get the following error: “Fatal: Fatal: config cannot be loaded: unsupported repository version”.
I haven’t knowingly changed anything on my system. My initial search indicated that this is due to restic not being upgraded, but if I try and upgrade restic I get: “restic is already the newest version (0.12.1-2ubuntu0.3).”
Does anyone know how to solve this, please?
This is ongoing - anyone have a solution?
I’m not sure but I’ve seen many people using different versions
Please show
restic version all
Maybe this also
restic cat --repo ... --verbose config
Mine just works, for just a short example:
sudo restic -r /tmp/restic-repo backup /etc
[sudo] password for me:
enter password for repository:
repository e6643b68 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
created new cache in /root/.cache/restic
using parent snapshot ab107efa
Files: 36 new, 0 changed, 3186 unmodified
Dirs: 15 new, 11 changed, 426 unmodified
Added to the repository: 167.388 KiB (46.785 KiB stored)
processed 3222 files, 10.835 MiB in 0:00
snapshot 4ac10bce saved
cd /tmp/restic-repo/snapshots && ls
4ac10bced7a4beb95d6d20e35b6ebc3c1bbdadd81f7438304cc6967d3542d57f
ab107efa31654ff5c8a3ad2c44f9b26da3d5760dd9798c22b622ea12884bf
Hi, thanks for replying!
restic version all
gives:
restic 0.12.1 compiled with go1.18.1 on linux/amd64
And
restic cat --repo … --verbose config
gives:
Fatal: unable to open config file: stat …/config: no such file or directory
Is there a repository at the following location?
…
I can’t remember which version is needed for V2
Mine currently is:
restic version
restic 0.16.4 compiled with go1.22.2 on linux/amd64
I feel this would be better at the restic forum: https://forum.restic.net/
Good Luck I wish I could could help you better. 
And Welcome to Discourse
I do not see a firm answer to the question in your output, so let’s ask again:
Is there a config file at that location?
If so, is it a valid config file, or is it corrupted?
Thank you, so it seems there is a new version of restic, but the Ubuntu repository isn’t updated?
The restic forum website seems to be down, unfortunately.
Thank you! Unfortunately it doesn’t show the full path, only …/config - how can I find it?
have you set or exported the RESTIC_REPOSITORY (and possibly RESTIC_PASSWORD) environment variables so it knows where to look ?
I have no idea how or where you created your Back-up Repo.
Try checking your .bash_history for any clues.
I created my Repo in this Directory (local)
ls /backup/restic/config && ls config
/backup/restic/config
config
It’s owned by root
/backup/restic🔒
└─> stat config
File: config
Size: 155 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 252,0 Inode: 19661065 Links: 1
Access: (0400/-r--------) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2024-12-22 11:22:11.853538545 -0700
Modify: 2024-12-22 11:21:18.184693950 -0700
Change: 2024-12-22 11:21:18.204693520 -0700
Birth: 2024-12-22 11:21:18.184693950 -0700
If your password has been changed or forgotten then more steps will be needed.
have you set or exported the
RESTIC_REPOSITORY(and possiblyRESTIC_PASSWORD) environment variables so it knows where to look ?
Yes, I had been using it for over a year, and it was working fine until a few weeks ago.
so if you check where that RESTIC_REPOSITORY variable points to right now, is there a file called “config” in there ?
Oh, I see - I have two separate backups, both of which stopped working at the same time with the above error message. RESTIC_REPOSITORY for each points to a Backblaze bucket. There is a config file in each.
The same thing has happened to me as well…
Same version of Ubuntu:
➜ ~ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS"
Same error message:
➜ ~ restic -r my-repository stats
Fatal: Fatal: config cannot be loaded: unsupported repository version
Same version of restic:
➜ ~ restic version
restic 0.12.1 compiled with go1.18.1 on linux/amd64
I installed and configured restic on multiple machines at the same time, one of those via ansible, and looking back at the config history I can see that I installed 0.16.1, which must have been the latest version at the time.
I can still query the repository from that machine, and it reports (version 2, compression level auto).
According to the changelog, compression was added to restic in 0.14.0 and introduced version 2 of the repository format. So I must have originally had a version between 0.14.0 and 0.16.1.
I searched through my ~/.zsh_history and can see that I installed restic via apt, then immediately ran a self-update:
sudo apt install restic
sudo restic self-update
I then searched my /var/log/apt/history.log files for restic:
Start-Date: 2024-11-22 13:08:13
Requested-By: me (1000)
Install: …
Upgrade: … restic:amd64 (0.12.1-2ubuntu0.2, 0.12.1-2ubuntu0.3) …
End-Date: 2024-11-22 13:14:46
It turns out my last automated snapshot was taken the day before on 2024-11-21, so this update probably broke things.
I’m assuming that version 0.12.1-2ubuntu0.3 was released on the Ubuntu repo and overwrote the version installed by running sudo restic self-update. The newly downgraded version could then no longer access the (now) unsupported repository.
I have since uninstalled restic via apt and manually installed it using the release from GitHub to prevent this happening again.
Thank you! This is extremely helpful, and good to know someone else was affected. I will try uninstalling and re-installing via GitHub to see if that fixes things.
This has now been resolved. For anyone else coming across this, I uninstalled the version of restic I had, and then installed a newer version:
snap install restic --channel=latest/edge --classic
After this, my backup scripts, etc, worked again as normal.