restly-backup

Integrate restic with Gnome for automatic backups in the background.

Features:

• With the default config (set up using configure-root):
  • Back up the filesystems mounted at / and /home
  • Skip most caches, temporary files, and the Trash
  • Automatically run backups and maintenance tasks
  • Keep 48 hourly, 14 daily, 8 weekly, 12 monthly, and 5 yearly backups
• Only run backups when the internet connection is not metered and wall power is available
• Run quietly in the background
  • When possible use Linux kernel cgroup CPU utilization clamping to request an energy-efficient core
  • Otherwise, pin ourself to a random core and lower that core's frequency to the minimum while we are running (tested on Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (20XXS0Y800) with good results)
  • Use ionice and nice
• Inhibit Gnome suspend for long-running cleanup operations
• Can use encrypted SSH keys from the Gnome Keyring that are only unlocked at login to access the restic repository
• Automatically remove stale, server-side restic locks and try to auto-repair the restic index when backups fail
• When doing restic prune, first do a basic quick prune and then attempt a more throughout prune

Assumptions:

• Each machine has a separate restic repo which it uses exclusively
  • This allows restly to remove stale server-side restic locks without user-intervention

Tested on Ubuntu 22.10 and Fedora 39.

Install

sudo apt install restic stow trash-cli 
# OR 
sudo dnf install restic stow trash-cli

cd ~/.local/stow
git clone [email protected]:luisgerhorst/restly-backup.git 
stow --target=$HOME \
  --ignore=.git --ignore=.gitignore --ignore=LICENSE --ignore=README.md \
  restly-backup

# For quiet backups without kernel uclamp support:
echo "$USER	ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/cpupower" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/$USER-cpupower-for-restly

export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
restly help

Setup

Run restly configure to create a config that backs up you machine's root filesystem (i.e., skipping external drives and temporary / caches files). It will prompt you for the backup destination (the restic repo) and encryption password. It enables the automatic backups (using systemd timers for the default repo).

For monitoring and testing the following might be helpful:

systemctl --user start restly-backup
systemctl --user status restly-backup
journalctl --user -f -u restly-backup
systemctl --user list-timers
restly default cmd snapshots

Config files:

• systemd: Invokes restly-cron
• ~/.authinfo.d/restly_$REPO_password
• ~/.config/restly/$REPO.sh
  • Backup destination and encryption password
  • Can also specify additional options, e.g., retention policy by setting RESTIC_FORGET
    • See script for the default policy.
• ~/.config/restly/$DIR/conf.sh
• ~/.config/restly/$DIR/exclude.txt