Restix-backup : an extended restic backup

Recipes
1

Restic is a great backup tool, but has some limitations:

  • insufficent btrfs support: one cannot backup a whole filesystem with subvolumes
  • no full backup of all local filesystems (all-in-one)
  • no support for chattr file attributes
  • no snapshot consistency
  • no default exclude list

To overcome these limitations and inspired by IBM Storage Protect (TSM) I have written the restic wrapper script restix-backup which also automatically deletes old backups:

restix-backup: save a snapshot with all file attributes, prune and check
usage: restix-backup [-v] [-n] [-f] [-x] [-X] [-Z] [-K] [-k DAYS,WEEKS] [-t TAG] [-H] [-e 'PATTERN'] DIRECTORY [...]
options: -v  verbose output
         -n  no action, dry run
         -f  use fsfreeze in second run to suspend writes to the filesystem
         -x  do not cross filesystem boundaries
         -X  do not save chattr extended file attributes
         -Z  do not check the repository for errors
         -K  keep all snapshots, no auto-delete (forget+prune)
         -k  keep DAYS daily and WEEKS weekly snapshots (default: 7,4)
         -t  store snapshot with TAG
         -H  prefix TAG with hostname
         -e  exclude files with sh PATTERN, may be repeated
         -h  show help
example: keep 10 daily and 8 weekly snapshots
         restix-backup -k 10,8 /
example: keep all snapshots, store with "extra" tag
         restix-backup -K -t extra /opt /sw
example: exclude "tmp" and "cache" directories
         restix-backup -e tmp -e cache /home

If DIRECTORY is / then subvolumes are included but no other filesystems.
If DIRECTORY is // then all filesystems(*) are saved in one snapshot.
If DIRECTORY is /// then snapshots of all filesystems(*) are saved.
(*) filesystem must be rw mounted and of type ext2 ext3 ext4 xfs btrfs
restix-backup respects /root/.restic/exclude
restix-backup saves only one snapshot per day (most recent).
restix-backup saves chattr file attributes in DIRECTORY/.chattr
restix-backup -H is necessary when multiple hosts use a common repository.
restix-backup cannot handle filenames with newline character correctly.
restix-restore restores files with chattr attributes if available.

See restix

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