rebade

rebade is the Restic Backup Daemon, a friendly frontend for restic. It uses a central JSON configuration file to manage sources and targets and allows invocation by calling those repositories by name. This makes it easier to remember complex syntax for repository URIs and such.

It additionally has a daemon component which monitors and tracks user activity of a system. This enables it to execute a restic system backup after a specific amount of activity. In other words, it is easy to setup a cron job to create a backup every 6 hours, but rebade only backs up after 6 hours of work time, i.e., time in which there was some input to the system. Activity time is also persisted (unlike systemd timers unfortunately).

Configuration

There is a configuration file that usually is located in /etc/rebade/config.json. It may look something like this, which is fairly close to the backup configuration I'm running myself:

{
	"plans": {
		"system-backup": {
			"default": true,
			"source": {
				"paths": [
					"/"
				],
				"exclude": [
					"/proc",
					"/sys",
					"/dev",
					"/var/cache/apt/archives",
					"/run/user",
					"/tmp",
					"/mnt",
					"/media",
					"/run/snapd",
					"/home/joe/.steam/steamapps/common",
					"/home/joe/.cache",
					"/root/.cache"
				]
			},
			"target": {
				"method": "sftp",
				"username": "joe",
				"hostname": "my-backup-server.com",
				"remote_path": "/backup/joe/restic"
			},
			"post_hooks": [
				{
					"method": "http_get",
					"condition": "success",
					"uri": "https://hc-ping.com/ba789f38-cc2f-4f09-8b17-d48c5b99247a"
				}
			],
			"keyfile": "/etc/rebade/backup_key.txt",
			"soft_period_secs": 18000,
			"hard_period_secs": 21600
		}
	}
}

Multiple "plans" may be specified, but this configuration knows only one, which centrally backs up the whole system. When running in daemonized mode, a backup is started after the period. Note there are two values here, one is set to 5 hours and the other to 6 hours.

What this means is that as soon as the "soft" period is reached, a backup is triggered only if the user is now absent (no activity recoded for a period of at least 5 minutes). As soon as the "hard" period is reached, a backup is triggered in any case. The idea behind this is that when you leave your computer for a lunch break and we could do a backup, do it while the user is away. After some threshold is reached, perform a backup either way. Note that the backup is running with minimal nice and ionice settings to be as non-intrusive as possible.

Also note that after a successful backup, we notify a third-party service so that we can monitor if backups fail for some reason.

Usage

If you want to configure daemon mode, place a configuration file and then run:

# rebade daemon -a install

Which will install and activate a corresponding systemd unit.

License

GNU GPL-3.