Using restic on Box via rclone

Writing this one as much for myself as anyone else, since I’ve hit the gotcha twice already and had to figure it out both times…

Just to note — I’m not going to go through actually setting up the repo, in my opinion the [restic](https://restic.net/) and [rclone](https://rclone.org/) docs are great and walk you through that quite nicely. (Though if you disagree and want a follow-up article then let me know in the comments.)

I was setting up a backup with [restic](https://restic.net/)using a repo on Box (via the awesome rclone tool). The repo would init, but when trying to do anything else I got the following errors:

Load(<key/8d7cd73b2f>, 0, 0) returned error, retrying after 720.254544ms: <key/8d7cd73b2f> does not exist

It turns out this is due to the Box end automatically classifying the new directories with a “highly confidential” flag, preventing certain levels of access.

(It’s possible this is specific to the company I work for, but I figure Box must offer the functionality or we wouldn’t be able to use it.)

To make the repo function correctly I needed to go to the web UI, and reclassify the repo directory to a lower level, reducing the sensitivity. Since the files which will be living in there will be encrypted by resticthis seems okay to me.

Originally published at https://www.solarwinter.net on March 17, 2025.