Dear Fabio and Richard, I apologize for blocking this issue with my proposal. I think Fabio's proposal of splitting the changes in this patch is the best way forward, if you agree as well Richard. I submitted [0] to refactor the restic-guix procedure in a way that it can support many different commands. After it gets in it should be sufficient to add "init" to %restic-guix-supported-actions to have a working restic-guix init invokation. it should be then matter of understanding where it is better to put it. Lately I was thinking that may be best to have initialization as a one shot Shepherd service that check whether a given job is supposed to have its repository initialized and if that's the case it could run restic-guix init name-of the job. Please Richard let me know what you think of this approach and whether you would still be interested in implementing it, thank you very much! I think the following subdivision should match all requirements we stated until now: 1. Improve the restic backup system service . This can be done in the current issue #71639: services: backup: Add password-command support to restic-service services: backup: Add extra-packages field to restic-backup-job services: backup: Move restic package to restic-configuration 2. Refactor the restic-guix function to allow for more restic commands to be wrapped. This can be done in issue #72803: services: restic-backup: Add more restic commands to the restic-guix package. 3. Allow for repositories to be initialized with a restic-guix init command. This commit could be adapted and moved to a new branch based on #72803: services: backup: Support bootstrapping an initial restic backup What do you think? Could this be a suitable action plan? Thank you very much for your work, giacomo [0]: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/72803