backup-with-borg

Backup tool to easily create archives with borgbackup.

Usage

Create a new archive with the default configuration (i.e., default.env and default.exclude):

backup do-create

Prune your archives according to KEEP_* variables in the configuration file:

backup do-prune

Compact your archives to free up space. This functionality was separated from borg's prune functionality in borg 1.2.

backup do-compact

Create a new archive, prune the repository archives, then compact the repository archives. (Wraps do-create, do-prune, and do-compact. This can also be accomplished by simply invoking backup, which if you have installed backup-with-borg to the default location will be /usr/local/bin/backup.)

backup

Wrapper

You also can use native borg commands like list or mount. These will respect the exported BORG_* variables. So a plain backup list will list all of your current archives in the configured repository. If you want to execute borg list (or any other borg commands) on a specific borg archive, make sure you prepend two colons to the repository name. As an example:

# List borg archives, in this case there are two entries listed
$ backup list
testvm-full-2019-05-21T06:30:00 Tue, 2019-05-21 06:30:00 [HASH]
testvm-full-2019-05-21T07:30:00 Tue, 2019-05-21 07:30:00 [HASH]

# Pull info from this specific borg archive:
$ backup info ::testvm-full-2019-05-21T07:30:00

# Run a diff against two borg archives:
$ backup diff ::testvm-full-2019-05-21T06:30:00 testvm-full-2019-05-21T07:30:00

Different configurations

If you want to use different configurations on the same machine, you can set the BACKUP_CONF environment variable. For example, you may have /etc/backup/default.env as well as /etc/backup/secondrepo.env configuration files present. To invoke the second configuration, which will execute the create and prune operations, simply enter: BACKUP_CONF=secondrepo /usr/local/bin/backup

Installation

You need to install borgbackup prior to your first run. See borg's installations instructions for details.

Note that for a single-user installation you can place your config files under the ~/.config/backup directory.

Install scripts

git clone https://github.com/jhuscott/backup-with-borg
cd backup-with-borg
make install
cp /etc/backup/{example,default}.env
cp /etc/backup/{example,default}.exclude

Edit default environment and exclusion config files

# edit default.env to match backup data
$EDITOR /etc/backup/default.env

# edit default.exclude to modify any patterns that should be excluded.
# NOTE: Any directories that contain an empty file called 
# `.nobackup` will automatically be excluded from the backup.
$EDITOR /etc/backup/default.exclude

Initialize the repository

# Note that with borg ≥1.1 you must specify the encryption type at initialization.
backup init -e <preferred_encryption_technique>
# Suggest repokey-blake2 (key stored in repo) or 
# keyfile-blake2 (separate keyfile, which is more secure)
# e.g.: 
backup init -e keyfile-blake2

WARNING: Make sure you export the borg key and store the result in a safe place!

backup key export --paper > ~/encrypted-key-backup.txt
backup key export --qr-html > ~/encrypted-key-backup.html

Add cron job

# This example shows an hourly backup, which will execute 
# (wrap) do-create, do-prune, and do-compact.
{ /usr/bin/crontab -l ; echo "0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/backup"; } | /usr/bin/crontab -
# NOTE: If you are using a crontab entry, for security purposes, you should specify the full path to the script. The example given here
# assumes you have installed backup-with-borg to the default location, e.g.: /usr/local/bin/backup.

Hint: Depending on your configuration, you may need sudo for some commands.