snapborg

Automated backups of snapper snapshots to borg repositories. Based on sftbackup and inspired by borgmatic.

How it works

Snapper operates on one or many configs for filesystems or subvolumes, for each of which automated snapshots are created. Often only a single config called root is used. The snapborg configuration file (/etc/snapborg.yaml) is used to create a mapping (snapper config) <-> (borg repository) and then those snapshots created by snapper are transferred to the remote (or local) borg repository.

A very basic snapborg configuration would look like this:

configs:
  - name: root
    repo: backupuser@backuphost:root

Normally you might not want to synchronize all the snapper snapshots to the remote backup destination, thus per-repo retention settings can be configured to determine which snapshots will actually be backed up. Note that by default, old snapshots will be pruned from the borg archive according to the retention settings, unless the --no-prune flag is given.

Example:

Snapper creates hourly snapshots, but you only want to transfer the most recent snapshot, one snapshot for each of the past 6 months and one snapshot for each of the past 3 years. The config would look as follows:

configs:
  - name: snapper_config_1
    ...
    retention:
      keep_last: 1
      keep_hourly: 0
      keep_daily: 0
      keep_weekly: 0
      keep_monthly: 6
      keep_yearly: 3
    ...

Fault tolerant mode

In some scenarios, the backup target repository is not permanently reachable, e. g. when an external HDD is used which is only plugged in from time to time. In these cases, normally an execution of snapborg would fail. However snapborg features a fault tolerant mode, which can be enabled by specifying the following in snapborg.cfg:

configs:
  - name: snapper_config_1
    ...
    fault_tolerant_mode: true
    last_successful_backup_max_age: <time period>
    ...

<time period> must be given as days (e.g. "3d") or as hours (e.g. "6h") and specifies the maximum age of the last backup successfully transferred to the borg repo. When snapborg cannot transfer a recent snapshot to the repository, it will only fail if the last snapshot which was transferred during an earlier executions older than the given time period.

Usage

Command line

# snapborg [general options] <command> [command options]

General options:
  --cfg             Snapborg config file (defaults to /etc/snapborg.yaml)
  --dryrun          Don't actually do anything
  --snapper-config  Only operate on a single snapper config
                    given by its name

Commands:
  init          Initialize (create) the configured borg repositories

  list          List all snapper snapshots and show whether
                they are already backed up

  prune         Prune old borg backup archives

  backup        Backup snapper snapshots
    --recreate  Delete possibly existing borg archives and recreate them from
                scratch
    --no-prune  Ignore retention policy and don't prune old backups

  clean-snapper Delete snapborg metadata stored alongside
                snapper snapshots

Systemd units

You will find relevant systemd units in usr/lib/systemd/system/.

• To enable regular backups for all configs, run systemctl enable --now snapborg-backup-all-hourly.timer
• To enable regular backups for a specific config, run systemctl enable --now [email protected] for each config (replace configname with your config's name)
• You can also run backups daily; just use daily instead of hourly above.
• To customize the default configuration, don't modify the packaged systemd unit files directly; instead, make a copy or a drop-in of the unit file under /etc/systemd/system. This can easily be done with systemctl edit [--full] <unit file>.

Dependencies

• snapper >= 0.8.6
• borg
• Python:
  • packaging
  • pyyaml