psb

pretty-safe-backup ;)

Backups are extremely important, and there's tons of great software available that come with different ways to customize your backups. One that inspired this project is Rsnapshot, it's perfect as long as the computer is always running, otherwise things get a little weird... I'm hoping this will fill the gap.

• On the go, sometime's you don't have time to wait for, or even notice you have a backup operation running. If an operation is interupted, it will be discarded, and restart next time you open your laptop.
• How many snapshots!? Using rsync, only new and modified files are copied, all other files that have not changed are hard linked to the snapshot as to not take up 100% of that space again.
• Hard links, not to be confused with symbolic links, when the original file's snapshot reaches end of life, any hard links to that file will still have the original data.

Setup

Dependencies: openssh, rsync, cp
Build dependencies: golang, make, goxc

Build

make build

Install/Update

sudo make install

Remote server

Skip this section if your backup directory is mounted locally.

Dependencies: openssh, rsync, psb-rotatorc, psb-rotatord
SSH keys must be generated and authorized for passwordless login.

Ensure dependencies are met, and psb-rotatord is properly configured.

Add the following line to sudoers file, this is necessary to allow Rsync to maintain file ownership during transfers. Replace "psbuser" with the username of the SSH user.

psbuser ALL= NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/rsync

Then back to the host...

Configuration

Any edits to existing run configs (regardless of method) will require a restart of the rotator daemon for the changes to take effect and to drop the old data from memory.

To generate a run config, start by creating a profile, see the explanation and example below.

Profile explanation:

• enabled: True to enable, or false to disable.
• name: The name field in the config must match the name of the file(not including extension ".toml"), and should contain no spaces.
• description: A short description of the backup operation.
• source: Absolute path to source directory.
• includes: Add paths relative to source to directories or files to make exceptions to an excluded directory, accepts wildcard as well.
• excludes: Add paths relative to source to directories or files, accepts wildcard as well.
• backup-directory: Optional. Overrides the path to the backups directory.
• remote-host: Only for remote backup destination. Address to remote backup server.
• username: Only for remote backup destination. Username of SSH user on remote backup server.
• port: Only for remote backup destination. SSH port to remote backup server.
• private-key: Only for remote backup destination. Path to the private key used to authenticate SSH communication with remote backup server.
• frequency: Number of minutes to wait between snapshots.
• delay: Number of minutes to wait between adding the most recent snapshot to initial rotation. Works best in increments of whatever frequency is set to. If delay is less than frequency, every snapshot gets archived.
• initial: Number of days to keep timed snapshots.
• daily: Number of months to keep daily snapshots.
• monthly: Number of months to keep monthly snapshots.
• yearly: Number of years to keep yearly snapshots.

Example profile:

enabled = true
name = "home"
description = "Emergency Hoth evacuation backups"
source = "/home/leia"
includes = ["excluded_directory/overriden_directory_to_keep"]
excludes = [".cache/*", "excluded_directory"]
backup-directory = ""
remote-host = "192.168.1.100"
username = "remoteuser"
port = "22"
private-key = "/home/leia/.ssh/id_rsa"
frequency = 5
delay = 60
initial = 7
daily = 2
monthly = 10
yearly = 2

After you have a profile created, load it!

sudo psb -L /path/to/profile

Run configs, by default, are generated in /etc/xdg/psb/run/

Enable and start service

An example Systemd service file can be found in ./examples

sudo cp ./examples/psb.service /etc/systemd/system/psb.service
systemctl enable psb.service
systemctl start psb.service