backwrap

A simple wrapper for creating backups written in bash. It currently supports borg and restic as backup tools.

Compared to the well-known borgmatic, this wrapper follows another philosophy. It aims to have no dependencies other than bash and some utilities that are most likely to be present on every GNU/Linux system.

In addition to handling regular files and directories, backwrap can automatically snapshot btrfs subvolumes before backing them up, which is a must when consistency matters (e.g. for database backups).

It's configuration is very simple and should be doable in under 5 minutes.

Also, backwrap integrates nicely with crontab and provides a built-in command for generating a suitable crontab entry with no effort. You specify the desired backup interval, and backwrap does the rest for you.

Setup

1. Clone the repository.

   git clone https://github.com/efficiosoft/backwrap
   

2. Adapt the sample configuration to your needs.

   cd backwrap
   cp backup.cfg.sample backup.cfg
   
   # Make your changes as documented in the sample configuration.
   vim backup.cfg
   

3. Run backwrap.

   # This will show the usage options.
   ./backwrap
   
   # If you haven't done already, generate a secure passphrase and
   # initialize the borg/restic repository to store your backups.
   umask 077
   pwgen -s 40 1 > backup.cfg.passphrase
   ./backwrap init
   
   # And this will take a backup.
   ./backwrap backup
   

4. Optionally, set up a cronjob to take backups regularly.

   mkdir /etc/backwrap.d
   mv backup.cfg backup.cfg.passphrase /etc/backwrap.d
   CONFIG=/etc/backwrap.d ./backwrap gen-crontab > /etc/cron.d/backwrap
   

Upgrade

Simply pull upgrades from the master branch.

cd /path/to/your/backwrap/repository
git pull

Backing up to SFTP

When backing up to a SFTP server which listens on a port other than 22, or which requires public key authentication with a key other than your default id_rsa, you can create a custom host configuration in ~/.ssh/config:

Host backup_host
  Hostname my-backup-server.de
  Port 12322
  User backup_user
  IdentityFile /root/.ssh/id_rsa_backup
  LogLevel ERROR

The LogLevel ERROR causes OpenSSH to not print a warning when the host's IP address changed, which will happen when using dynamic DNS.

Now, you just need to specify the repository in the backwrap config like so:

RESTIC_REPO="sftp://backup_host/restic"

or

BORG_REPO="backup_host:borg"