4.4 KiB
title: Atticmatic
Overview
atticmatic is a simple Python wrapper script for the Attic and Borg backup software that initiates a backup, prunes any old backups according to a retention policy, and validates backups for consistency. The script supports specifying your settings in a declarative configuration file rather than having to put them all on the command-line, and handles common errors.
Here's an example config file:
[location]
# Space-separated list of source directories to backup.
source_directories: /home /etc
# source_directories_glob: 1
# Path to local or remote backup repository.
repository: user@backupserver:sourcehostname.attic
[retention]
# Retention policy for how many backups to keep in each category.
keep_daily: 7
keep_weekly: 4
keep_monthly: 6
[consistency]
# Consistency checks to run, or "disabled" to prevent checks.
checks: repository archives
Additionally, exclude patterns can be specified in a separate excludes config file, one pattern per line.
atticmatic is hosted at https://torsion.org/atticmatic with source code available. It's also mirrored on GitHub and BitBucket for convenience.
Setup
To get up and running, follow the Attic Quick
Start or the Borg Quick
Start to create a
repository on a local or remote host. Note that if you plan to run atticmatic
on a schedule with cron, and you encrypt your attic repository with a
passphrase instead of a key file, you'll need to set the atticmatic
encryption_passphrase configuration variable. See the repository encryption
section of the Quick Start for more info.
If the repository is on a remote host, make sure that your local root user has key-based ssh access to the desired user account on the remote host.
To install atticmatic, run the following command to download and install it:
sudo pip install --upgrade atticmatic
If you are using Attic, copy the following configuration files:
sudo cp sample/atticmatic.cron /etc/cron.d/atticmatic
sudo mkdir /etc/atticmatic/
sudo cp sample/config sample/excludes /etc/atticmatic/
If you are using Borg, copy the files like this instead:
sudo cp sample/borgmatic.cron /etc/cron.d/borgmatic
sudo mkdir /etc/borgmatic/
sudo cp sample/config sample/excludes /etc/borgmatic/
Lastly, modify the /etc files with your desired configuration.
Usage
You can run atticmatic and start a backup simply by invoking it without arguments:
atticmatic
Or, if you're using Borg, use this command instead to make use of the Borg backend:
borgmatic
This will also prune any old backups as per the configured retention policy, and check backups for consistency problems due to things like file damage.
By default, the backup will proceed silently except in the case of errors. But if you'd like to to get additional information about the progress of the backup as it proceeds, use the verbosity option:
atticmattic --verbosity 1
Or, for even more progress spew:
atticmattic --verbosity 2
If you'd like to see the available command-line arguments, view the help:
atticmattic --help
Running tests
First install tox, which is used for setting up testing environments:
pip install tox
Then, to actually run tests, run:
tox
Troubleshooting
Broken pipe with remote repository
When running atticmatic on a large remote repository, you may receive errors like the following, particularly while "attic check" is validating backups for consistency:
Write failed: Broken pipe
attic: Error: Connection closed by remote host
This error can be caused by an ssh timeout, which you can rectify by adding the following to the ~/.ssh/config file on the client:
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 120
This should make the client keep the connection alive while validating backups.
Issues and feedback
Got an issue or an idea for a feature enhancement? Check out the atticmatic issue tracker. In order to create a new issue or comment on an issue, you'll need to login first.
Other questions or comments? Contact mailto:witten@torsion.org.