I switched to Btrbk, this repository is now archived.

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PiServer Backup

PiServer Backup is a simple backup solution initially written for Raspberry Pi server. However, it should work on other unix platforms as well.

The software will create a backup archive which looks like this:

<destination>
+-- 2021-04-02t07-00-12+0200
|   +-- mariadb
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- boot
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- root
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- data
|   |   +-- ...
+-- 2021-04-01t19-00-08+0200
|   +-- mariadb
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- boot
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- root
|   |   +-- ...
|   +-- data
|   |   +-- ...
...

The backup process contains the following steps:

1. running pre of backup_hooks (used e.g. for mounting a backup volume)
2. running pre of snapshot_hooks
3. taking snapshots of [[sources]] (for type = "rsync" this means copying)
4. running post of snapshot_hooks (in reversed order)
5. saving snapshots to destination, cleaning up snapshots
6. cleaning up old backups
7. running post of backup_hooks (in reversed order)

In case of errors the software tries to restore a clean state. This means:

• For every successful pre of a hook the corresponding post is run. The only exception are critical hooks, if one of them fails the program will exit immediately. This setting is probably not useful for snapshot_hooks.
• Snapshots will be taken only if pre of all hooks succeeded.
• If taking a snapshot fails, no snapshots will be saved but the successfully taken snapshots will be cleaned.
• Old backups will only be cleaned if saving the snapshots succeeded.

For convenience (and in order to make debugging easier) new backups are named <date>.in-progress. Such a folder is created at the end of step 1 and renamed to <date> just at the beginning of step 6.

TODO

• CI
• Proper SMTP configuration
• btrfs sources
• doc strings
• unit testing