rbackup - An rsync-based backup tool

Yet another rsync-based tool for automating backups and using plugins.

Rationales

• 'Keep It Simple Stupid'
• Automate as much of the process as possible. This includes options, path selections, and managing snapshots
• Store backups in a format that does not require a program or script; this means that backups can be browsed with a file manager
• Deleted files are kept in old snapshots and rotated out using the rotation script
• Subsequent backups do not touch each other, unless specified by the user. This reduces the risk of overwriting backups with corrupted files

Features

• Snapshot-based backup management
• Creation of installed package lists and archives of package manager databases
• AppArmor profiles

Advanced Features

• rbackup depends on the filesystem that stores the repository to provide features such as checksumming, deduplication, and data integrity verification
• Encryption must be handled by an external program, this is out of scope for rbackup
• xattrs and acl's are handled by rsync but must be a supported feature of the filesystem the repository is stored on

Target Directories

• /boot/loader
• /etc
• /home
• /root
• /var
  • /var/lib
  • /var/log
• Plugins
  • Installed packages
  • Package manager databases

Backup Directory Hierarchy

Repository
  current -> data/snapshot2
  data
    snapshot1
      .metadata
    snapshot2
      .metadata
  .metadata

Assuming snapshot2 was the most recent backup and snapshot1 was the backup before that:

• "current" would link to snapshot2
• Unchanged files files from snapshot1 backed up to snapshot2 are hardlinked to snapshot1

Implementation Notes

• pathlib is used for path handling
• When hardlinking, rbackup passes the entire path to avoid needing relative paths
• The backup script changes the process umask to 0000

To-do

• Create a separate backup and network backup script
  • Think about using python-daemon for backupd
  • rbackup.script: add do_remote_backup function
• Add __enter__ and __exit__ for PackageManager lockfiles to prevent transactions during backup
• Create snapshot manipulation script
• Interactive cleanup script
  • Repository.__delitem__()
  • Reconfiguring Repository.snapshot_symlink whenever a snapshot is deleted
• Plugin API
  • Plugin.run() and Plugin.communicate() abstract methods
    • Plugin.run() is passed a set of specific arguments
      • snapshot?
• --dry-run touches the repository, change to make sure it doesn't

Dependencies

Runtime

• python>=3.7
• rsync

Build/Testing

• pytest
• setuptools
• hypothesis

License

This project is licensed under MIT. See LICENSE for more details.