Backup

Use restic and a systemd timer to periodically back up my home folder.

Prerequisites

Install rclone and restic. On Arch Linux, run:

sudo pacman -S rclone restic

Rclone

Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. —From its repo

• Run rclone config and let it set things up for you.
• rclone mount
  • Example:

    rclone mount mc:/ /home/leo/mnt/Onedrive --vfs-cache-mode full

  • More on this

Restic

Restic is a backup program that is fast, efficient and secure. —From its repo

• Use with rclone
  • Docs
• I wrote a shell script to save some typing.

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  restic -r rclone:mc:restic --no-scan --password-file=/home/leo/.config/restic/pw.txt  \
   --exclude-file=/home/leo/.config/restic/exclude.txt backup /home/leo
  

systemd timer

See the Arch Wiki page.

Basically, it’s like cron but better integrated with systemd.

Create backup.timer in ~/.config/systemd/user

[Unit]
Description=Use Restic to back up my home folder daily

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily
Persistent=true

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

Persistent=true means it will run at least once a day (or at next login).

Use backup.timer to trigger backup.service:

[Unit]
Description=Use Restic to back up my home folder daily

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/leo/bin/backup
Type=oneshot

Then run systemctl enable backup.timer --user to enable the timer. Everything is set now.

To verify, run systemctl list-timers --all --user to check the status of backup.timer:

NEXT                        LEFT    LAST                        PASSED      UNIT               ACTIVATES           
Sun 2022-11-20 00:00:00 CST 9h left Sat 2022-11-19 10:06:17 CST 4h 1min ago backup.timer backup.service

1 timers listed.

References

1. https://rclone.org/docs
2. https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
3. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Timers