borgmatic/docs/how-to/add-preparation-and-cleanup-steps-to-backups.md

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How to add preparation and cleanup steps to backups	key parent order 🧹 Add preparation and cleanup steps How-to guides 9

Preparation and cleanup hooks

If you find yourself performing preparation tasks before your backup runs, or cleanup work afterwards, borgmatic hooks may be of interest. Hooks are shell commands that borgmatic executes for you at various points as it runs, and they're configured in the hooks section of your configuration file. But if you're looking to backup a database, it's probably easier to use the database backup feature instead.

You can specify before_backup hooks to perform preparation steps before running backups and specify after_backup hooks to perform cleanup steps afterwards. Here's an example:

before_backup:
    - mount /some/filesystem
after_backup:
    - umount /some/filesystem

If your command contains a special YAML character such as a colon, you may need to quote the entire string (or use a multiline string) to avoid an error:

before_backup:
    - "echo Backup: start"

There are additional hooks that run before/after other actions as well. For instance, before_prune runs before a prune action for a repository, while after_prune runs after it.

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

New in version 1.7.0 The before_actions and after_actions hooks run before/after all the actions (like create, prune, etc.) for each repository. These hooks are a good place to run per-repository steps like mounting/unmounting a remote filesystem.

New in version 1.6.0 The before_backup and after_backup hooks each run once per repository in a configuration file. before_backup hooks runs right before the create action for a particular repository, and after_backup hooks run afterwards, but not if an error occurs in a previous hook or in the backups themselves. (Prior to borgmatic 1.6.0, these hooks instead ran once per configuration file rather than once per repository.)

Variable interpolation

The before and after action hooks support interpolating particular runtime variables into the hook command. Here's an example that assumes you provide a separate shell script:

after_prune:
    - record-prune.sh "{configuration_filename}" "{repository}"

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put this option in the hooks: section of your configuration.

In this example, when the hook is triggered, borgmatic interpolates runtime values into the hook command: the borgmatic configuration filename and the paths of the current Borg repository. Here's the full set of supported variables you can use here:

• configuration_filename: borgmatic configuration filename in which the hook was defined
• log_file New in version 1.7.12: path of the borgmatic log file, only set when the --log-file flag is used
• repository: path of the current repository as configured in the current borgmatic configuration file

Note that you can also interpolate in arbitrary environment variables.

Global hooks

You can also use before_everything and after_everything hooks to perform global setup or cleanup:

before_everything:
    - set-up-stuff-globally
after_everything:
    - clean-up-stuff-globally

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

before_everything hooks collected from all borgmatic configuration files run once before all configuration files (prior to all actions), but only if there is a create action. An error encountered during a before_everything hook causes borgmatic to exit without creating backups.

after_everything hooks run once after all configuration files and actions, but only if there is a create action. It runs even if an error occurs during a backup or a backup hook, but not if an error occurs during a before_everything hook.

Error hooks

borgmatic also runs on_error hooks if an error occurs, either when creating a backup or running a backup hook. See the monitoring and alerting documentation for more information.

Hook output

Any output produced by your hooks shows up both at the console and in syslog (when enabled). For more information, read about inspecting your backups.

Security

An important security note about hooks: borgmatic executes all hook commands with the user permissions of borgmatic itself. So to prevent potential shell injection or privilege escalation, do not forget to set secure permissions on borgmatic configuration files (chmod 0600) and scripts (chmod 0700) invoked by hooks.