title: Atticmatic date: save_as: atticmatic/index.html

Overview

atticmatic is a simple Python wrapper script for the Attic 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

# Path to local or remote Attic 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

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 install atticmatic, run the following command to download and install it:

sudo pip install --upgrade hg+https://torsion.org/hg/atticmatic

Then 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/

Modify those files with your desired configuration, including the path to an attic repository.

If you don't yet have an attic repository, then the first time you run atticmatic, you'll get an error with information on how to create a repository on a local or remote host.

And 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.

It is recommended that you create your attic repository with keyfile encryption, as passphrase-based encryption is less suited for automated backups. If you do 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 ATTIC_PASSPHRASE environment variable. See attic's repository encryption documentation for more info.

Usage

You can run atticmatic and start a backup simply by invoking it without arguments:

atticmatic

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 verbose option instead:

atticmattic --verbose

If you'd like to see the available command-line arguments, view the help:

atticmattic --help

Running tests

To install test-specific dependencies, first run:

sudo python setup.py test

To actually run tests, run:

nosetests

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 valiating 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.

Feedback

Questions? Comments? Got a patch? Contact mailto:witten@torsion.org.