Installation

As the API client is not published as a package, you’ll need to install the dependency manually

pip install git+https://github.com/truenas/api_client.git

Arguments

-h, --help

show the help message and exit.

-c FILE, --config FILE

the configuration file (default: ~/.config/truenas-backup/config.yml)

-o FILE, --output FILE

the output file. The file name can contain strftime directives. If the argument is specified, directory, name and keep fields of the configuration are ignored.

Configuration file

truenas:
   host: truenas.local[:port]
   api_user: truenas_admin
   api_key: ...
   ssl_verify: false
   call_timeout: 20
   backup_password: ...
output:
   directory: .
   name: "truenas-%Y%m%d-%H%M.backup"
   keep: 12

All fields except api_user and api_key are optional. The user the API key was generated for needs to have the FULL_ADMIN role (TrueNAS requirement).

host is a hostname or an IP address, and an optional port. Secure connection will be used.

The backup file is compressed using gzip first, then encrypted if backup_password is specified. It can be decrypted and unpacked manually using

openssl aes-256-cbc -d -md sha512 -pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -in ... | tar tvfz -

name specifies the name of the output file. strftime directives are allowed.

keep removes all but the most recent *.backup files from the directory, that in this case has to be specified and has to be an absolute path.

directory has to already exist. As the backup is not encrypted and contains secrets the permissions should be set accordingly.

Observability

The backups done can be exported through prometheus text-file format and consumed by the node exporter’s textfile collector. If the metrics key exists, the file is atomically populated after each backup run.

metrics:
    directory: "/var/local/lib/prom_metrics"
    suffix: "my-truenas"

directory is mandatory and specifies the path of the directory passed as the --collector.textfile.directory for the node_exporter. It has to already exist. suffix is optional and will be appended to the file name to distinguish metrics files generated by different configurations. For the above configuration the full file name will be /var/local/lib/prom_metrics/truenas-backup-my-truenas.prom.