4.6 KiB
Restic
Resitc is an encrypted, compressed and easily usable backup system.
Install Requirements
- Only need to install restic on the local machine! All the other stuff is just ssh. The server is used as a network attached disk.
- Upside: minimal work on the server
- Downside: No easy way to check online for this
pacman -S restic
Setup
To set up a repository, the name of a backup unit in restic, run on your local machine
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id init
This initializes (same way as git) the server side under the path /backups/machine_id.
You can also initalize it with a different local path (i.e. Harddrive) using
restic init --repo /path/backups
For more details, RTFM.
Backup Methods
To back up your system, you can use restic_files and the following command
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" --files-from ~/.config/restic/restic_files --no-scan backup
restic_files is just a file containing the patterns or paths of the things to back up.
You can also use the usual ssh config for using specific hostnames, users and ports.
You can automate this using a simple cron-job, which runs with the regularity you like.
The --no-scan option is useful to save some I/O overhead.
For more details, RTFM.
Restoring from Backups
To restore a full backup, run
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" --verbose restore SNAPSHOTNUMBER --target /your/fav/path
The snapshot number is the snapshot id you want to restore to, which you get by using
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" snapshots
This gives you a list of the snapshots with the dates and id's.
You can use --exclude and --include for the specific inclusion/exclusion of single files or folders. This allows to restore single files.
Here the files/folders have to be given using the path inside the snapshots. If you dont remember them, use restic -r ..... ls latests or restic -r ... find filename.
You can also mount the snapshots using
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" mount /your/fav/mountpoint
With this, you can browse the different snapshots. For this fusermount has to be installed.
For more details, RTFM.
Keeping an overview
You can list all snapshots using
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" snapshots
You should regularly check the health of your backups! This can be done by
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" check
This however just checks if the structure is okay. If you want to check, if all the data files are unmodified and in tact, this can be done using
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" check --read-data
This however might take some time.
If you want to remove some files from the snapshots, you can use
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" rewrite --exclude /path/to/wrongly/added/file SNAPSHOTNUMBER
RTFM for more info.
If you want to remove complete snapshots, either because they are old enough that you dont care anymore, or for other reasons, this can be done using
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" forget SNAPSHOTNUMBER
To also delte the data that is not needed anymore by any snapshot, run
restic -r sftp:user@backupserver.lan:/backups/machine_id --password-command "pass homeserver/restic/T490" prune
To combine both, use the --prune flag for the forget command.
See here for more info.
The selection can be automated using --keep-last and --keep-{hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly} flags to the forget command. For details see here.