rustic check prints lots of "pack XXXXXXXX is referenced by the index but not present! To repair: 'rustic repair index'" on a restic checked repo #1671

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1. github-actions

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   S-triageStatus: Waiting for a maintainer to triage this issue/PRStatus: Waiting for a maintainer to triage this issue/PR

   on Feb 10, 2026
2. zuzzurro

   changed the title [-]rustic check prints lots of "pack fbe9ce2b is referenced by the index but not present! To repair: 'rustic repair index'" on a restic checked repo[/-] [+]rustic check prints lots of "pack XXXXXXXX is referenced by the index but not present! To repair: 'rustic repair index'" on a restic checked repo[/+] on Feb 10, 2026
3. aawsome commented on Feb 10, 2026

   

   aawsome

   on Feb 10, 2026

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   Hi @zuzzurro!

   Could it be that you are running both rustic prune and restic prune on this repo?
4. zuzzurro commented on Feb 10, 2026

   

   zuzzurro

   on Feb 10, 2026

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   I may have tried either one or both some six months back but I do not remember for sure. Why? Can it cause problems?
5. zuzzurro commented on Feb 16, 2026

   

   zuzzurro

   on Feb 16, 2026

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   Anything I can do to help progress on this one? As you can imagine I'm mostly concerned with the health of my repo, with two tools telling me different things about the status of it..
6. aawsome commented on Feb 20, 2026

   

   aawsome

   on Feb 20, 2026

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   @zuzzurro Did you run a rustic repair index as proposed? Afterwards, check shouldn't print out these errors anymore. And if there is no other error, your repo should be sane.

   To give some background (what I think is happening here): rustic prune does not directly delete pack files, but only mark them as unused in a separate index structure. This index structure is not read by restic, but only by rustic. So, a follow-up restic prune may just remove these pack files as they are not indexed. Then the rustic check would complain about indexed, but not present pack files.
   Altogether, if this is the only error reported by rustic check and restic check doesn't report any error, there is no problem about repository integrity, only a mixing of somewhat incompatible prune behavior. I'll think about how we can handle such a case more nicely within rustic...
7. aawsome

   added

   A-compatibilityArea: Repo format is not (fully) compatible with resticArea: Repo format is not (fully) compatible with restic

   and removed

   S-triageStatus: Waiting for a maintainer to triage this issue/PRStatus: Waiting for a maintainer to triage this issue/PR

   on Feb 20, 2026
8. zuzzurro commented on Feb 20, 2026

   

   zuzzurro

   on Feb 20, 2026

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   OK, I did that on the second copy of the backup and now both restic and rustic say they are fine. rustic just removed all the unreferenced packs. Thanks for the explanation... I'm crossing my fingers the repo will be fine the moment I actually need to restore some files :-)
9. aawsome

   added a commit that references this issue on Feb 28, 2026

   fix: Add information about to_delete to check errors (#484)

   ...

   edc7a2f
10. aawsome commented on Feb 28, 2026

    

    aawsome

    on Feb 28, 2026

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    I added better output for the check errors in rustic-rs/rustic_core#484.
    Besides this, I'll close this issue as it can be explained by restic prune runs on the same repository.
11. aawsome

    closed this as completedon Feb 28, 2026