rsbackup 0.4.0

Backup for unix-like systems using rsync.

rsbackup

A simple rsync-based backup solution for unix systems.

rsbackup is a simple python application that uses rsync to create backups with support for hard links on incremental backups.

Installation

rsbackup requires a working installation of Python 3.10 and the rsync command line tool. rsbackup uses only rsync flags supported on both Linux and BSD versions (i.e. MacOS) of rsync.

Use the following command to install rsbackup:

pip install rsbackup

Usage

rsbackup reads backup configurations from a configuration TOML file. The default filename to read is $HOME/.config/rsbackup.toml but you can specify a different file using the -c cli switch.

The config file contains multiple backup configurations. It looks something like this

[projects]
description = 'All dev projects'
source = '/home/user/projects'
target = '/mnt/backup'
excludes = [
  '__pycache__/',
]

See rsbackup.toml for a documented example.

Each TOML table (i.e. each section header) defines a single backup configuration. The header contains the config's name. This is used as a command line argument to create a backup so pick something that needs no shell escaping.

Each table contains the following keys:

Key	Type	Optional	Description
description	string	yes	contains an optional description.
sources	array of string	no	lists the source directories to create a backup of
target	string	no	contains a target directory which will eventualy contain multiple backups
excludes	array of strings	yes	lists patterns to be excluded from the backup. See the rsync documentation for a description of the pattern format.

You can use

rsbackup list

to get a list of all backup configurations.

To create a backup, run

rsbackup create <name of the config>

This will create a new directory named after the timestamp (in seconds) inside the target to contain the backup.

If you run rsbackup create with the testconfiguration provided in rsbackup.toml you will get the following backup under tmp:

tmp
├── 2022-05-19_15-08-25
│   └── rsbackup
│       ├── config.py
│       ├── config_test.py
│       ├── __init__.py
│       ├── __main__.py
│       ├── rsbackup_test.py
│       ├── rsync.py
│       └── rsync_test.py
└── _latest -> /home/alex/Development/python/backup/tmp/2022-05-19_15-08-25

Of course, the name of the backup directory will depend on the local time you execute the backup. Notice that no __pycache__ directory is contained in the backup as it is excluded.

rsbackup provides the following command line options

Option	Default Value	Description
-h, --help	-	display a help message
-c CONFIG_FILE, --config-file CONFIG_FILE	$HOME/.config/rsbackup.yaml	path of the config file
-m, --dry-run	-	enable dry run; do not touch any files but output commands instead
--no-link-latest	-	skip linking unchanged files to latest copy (if exists)

Development

You need Python >= 3.9 to run and thus develop. tomli is used to load TOML files. pytest is used to execute unit and acceptance tests. setuptools is used as a PEP517 build backend.

requirements.txt only contains the minimal set of dependencies to install the application, so it only contains tomli.

License

Copyright 2022, 2023 Alexander Metzner.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.