This release fixes a couple of bugs on Windows and in the `restore` command. It also works around an unlikely yet possible situation with `rclone` which could potentially result in data loss.
restic is distributed as a standalone binary: download the correct file for your operating system and architecture, extract the file and just run it. If you run into any issues, please report them at the GitHub issue tracker or visit the forum. If you already have restic >= 0.9.4, you can use restic self-update to get the latest version in a secure way.
The binaries released with each restic version are reproducible, which means that you can reproduce a byte identical version from the source code for that release. Instructions on how to do that in the Developer Documentation.
Changelog for restic 0.16.3 (2024-01-14)
The following sections list the changes in restic 0.16.3 relevant to restic users. The changes are ordered by importance.
Summary

Fix #4560: Improve errors for irregular files on Windows
Fix #4574: Support backup of deduplicated files on Windows again
Fix #4612: Improve error handling for rclone backend
Fix #4624: Correct restore progress information if an error occurs
Fix #4626: Improve reliability of restoring large files

Details


Bugfix #4560: Improve errors for irregular files on Windows
Since Go 1.21, most filesystem reparse points on Windows are considered to be irregular files. This caused restic to show an error: invalid node type "" error message for those files.
This error message has now been improved and includes the relevant file path: error: nodeFromFileInfo path/to/file: unsupported file type "irregular". As irregular files are not required to behave like regular files, it is not possible to provide a generic way to back up those files.
#4560 #4620 https://forum.restic.net/t/windows-backup-error-invalid-node-type/6875


Bugfix #4574: Support backup of deduplicated files on Windows again
With the official release builds of restic 0.16.1 and 0.16.2, it was not possible to back up files that were deduplicated by the corresponding Windows Server feature. This also applied to restic versions built using Go 1.21.0-1.21.4.
The Go version used to build restic has now been updated to fix this.
#4574 #4621


Bugfix #4612: Improve error handling for rclone backend
Since restic 0.16.0, if rclone encountered an error while listing files, this could in rare circumstances cause restic to assume that there are no files. Although unlikely, this situation could result in data loss if it were to happen right when the prune command is listing existing snapshots.
Error handling has now been improved to detect and work around this case.
#4612 #4618


Bugfix #4624: Correct restore progress information if an error occurs
If an error occurred while restoring a snapshot, this could cause the restore progress bar to show incorrect information. In addition, if a data file could not be loaded completely, then errors would also be reported for some already restored files.
Error reporting of the restore command has now been made more accurate.
#4624 https://forum.restic.net/t/errors-restoring-with-restic-on-windows-server-s3/6943


Bugfix #4626: Improve reliability of restoring large files
In some cases restic failed to restore large files that frequently contain the same file chunk. In combination with certain backends, this could result in network connection timeouts that caused incomplete restores.
Restic now includes special handling for such file chunks to ensure reliable restores.
#4626 https://forum.restic.net/t/errors-restoring-with-restic-on-windows-server-s3/6943