How it works

Bupper is very simple: it will recurse through a given directory, looking for a special file indicating that it should be backedup (_BACKUP_THIS), and then it will put that directory into a .tar.gz archive, named after the directory and the current time, and scp it to a given location.

This has few moving parts and works well for a simple household-backup solution, where “whitelisting” a few important directories in your home for backup via transfer to a local network host makes the most sense.

Installation

Assuming Python’s pip is installed (for Debian-based systems, this can be installed with sudo apt-get install python-pip), bupper can be installed directly from PyPI:

pip install bupper

Python versions 3.3+ (and 2.6+) are supported and tested against.

Quick start

1. Think about how you will configure bupper. The main thing you will want to configure is the --remote flag, which should be remote host and path, or some sort of external storage, that would allow an SSH login:

   bupper \
   --source '/home/'\
   --remote 'backupuser@remote.host:/var/backups/bupper/'

2. Note: that ‘source’ does not actually back EVERYTHING up in that directory. Instead, it will recursively look for directories that contain a certain filename (_BACKUP_THIS).

3. Setup bupper with your chosen configuration to run on cron at a regular time (such as daily).

4. (Optional) Add cron jobs that clean up old backups – this is up to you how you want to do this.