blinskey / borg-backup-scripts

No longer maintained.

Borg Backup Scripts

I no longer use or maintain this repository. You may want to take a look at Borgmatic, which is a more mature tool with similar functionality.

This repository contains a handful of scripts that can be used to enable fully automated encrypted remote backups with Borg.

If you're not familiar with Borg, you'll probably want to start by taking a look at the project's documentation.

These scripts are not a substitute for a proper understanding of Borg and good backup practices. You should familiarize yourself with Borg and the contents of the scripts before using them to perform backups. These scripts have not been extensively tested; use at your own risk.

Prerequisites

• You'll need to install Borg on both your local machine and the machine where you plan to store your backups.
• The root account on your local machine needs passwordless SSH access to your remote server.

Bacic Usage

backup.sh is a wrapper around Borg that can perform a number of common operations:

Usage: backup.sh OPTION
  -c    create new archive
  -d    delete repository
  -h    print this help text and exit
  -i    initialize new repository
  -l    list contents of repository
  -p    prune archive
  -q    check remote quota usage
  -v    verify repository consistency

The script contains a number of variables that can be used to set the backup parameters. At the very least, you'll want to modify USER and HOST to specify your login and the address of the remote machine, HOME to set your home directory, and SOURCE_PATHS and EXCLUDE to specify the files to back up. The other available options are documented in the script.

If you'll be encrypting your backups, you'll also need to create a passphrase and define it in borg-passphrase.sh, which is sourced by backup.sh. To prevent accidental exposure of your passphrase, set the owernship and permissions on this file to the most restrictive settings possible ( such as root:root and 600).

The borg commands in backup.sh all include the option --remote-path=borg1. You will need to remove or modify this to account for the version of Borg that you're using and the name of the corresponding Borg script on your remote machine.

To initialize a new repository, run backup.sh -i. To perform a backup, run backup.sh -c.

Borg output is set at the default level ("warning") and is output to stdout and stderr. In addition, the script logs basic information to the system log.

Automation

You can run backup.sh manually, but you'll probably want to automate it using cron or anacron. The included run-backup.sh script is intended by be run by a cron job. It creates a new backup, then prunes the existing backups to conserve space.

A typical anacrontab entry to perform daily backups might look something like this:

1   5   remote-backup   /home/username/bin/run-backup.sh

Recommendations

You'll probably want to manually run backup.sh -v from time to time to check the state of the repository, and you should also occasionally perform a backup restoration to ensure that everything is working properly. (This script does not cover backup restoration.)

Be sure to make a secure local copy of your passphrase and repository key.