promise.md names Connect as a paid service for "keeping off-site backups", with
two constraints that are load-bearing rather than marketing: it never sees your
data, and every hosted service has a free equivalent in the open code. Nothing
was implemented — no endpoint, no account, no client support.
The client half turns out to be almost entirely there, because a Connect
destination is not a new kind of thing: it is a restic REST repository whose
password never leaves the machine. So `connect` resolves exactly like `rest` in
resticLocationUri — it IS one. It is a separate TYPE only so the UI can tell it
apart from a REST server someone runs themselves, which are identical on disk.
Availability is data, not code: CFG_BACKUP_CONNECT_ENDPOINT (empty) is reported
through the locations feed as connect:{available,endpoint}, and the wizard
renders from that — the option present but disabled, its panel saying what it
will be and that SFTP and S3 do the same job today. The day the service exists,
setting that one value turns it on with no release. Verified both ways.
The device code is a credential, so it goes through the secret channel as a
reference rather than travelling in the wizard payload, which is base64'd into a
world-readable task file.
Design, and what the service still has to provide, in
docs/roadmap/connect-backup-destination.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
99e81e9ab8