Restic Backups with systemd and Prometheus exporter · Jack's Blog

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-06 09:00:04

In this blog post I describe the workflow I currently use to create offsite backups of my servers. This post has been in the making for a while. I started writing the first version of it at the beginning of 2019. Now, two years later the setup has evolved into a shape where I feel comfortable sharing it.

The core of the setup is the excellent restic: a simple yet powerful tool to create remote backups. It supports snapshots and saves the data in a content-addressable storage format which makes it very bandwidth- and space-efficient. Thus it is also quite fast. Another nice feature of restic is also that it supports dozens of backends for storing data. Personally, I’m using the Backblaze B2 backend.

Restic can be configured entirely through environment variables, so I have a file which contains just these configuration variables and can be sourced by other scripts (/etc/restic-env.sh ). This file needs to have very strict permissions (e.g. 0600)!

The script first checks if the repository is already present on the remote site or if its needs to be created. Afterwards restic checks the repository for any errors. Finally, we create a new snapshot by running the restic backup command.