Support for multiple folders about autorestic HOT 17 CLOSED

I do have the very same situation - Situations where this would help me:

• Backup Server settings and data files: /etc and /opt, but no the rest
• Backup macOS machine, but only certain subdirectories of ~/Library/Containers, that are not temporary, but shall be saved.

Adding multiple locations would futhermore help in the readability:
If we have those locations repeated (including all of the options!) would lead to HUGE yaml file.
Yes: There are YAML anchors that could work around it.
But: Especially with hooks there comes a new problem:

I do have hook that triggers a web-request that the backups are complete. If I now have 5 locations instead of one, they would be triggered 5 times.
Okay, we could filter them - but: What if one of them fails, but the other 4 succeed? Now we still get triggers, although the complete result is invalid.

There are workaround that make most of it possible, yet very hard-to-read and the opposite this great project strives for. I really would love this feature implemented.

from autorestic.

That's a fair point. I'll see how this can be done. For not autorestic uses the path for finding the backups to restore. Probably the way to go is adding a tag to the backups with the name of location. conflicts can then occur if there are multiple config files with the same name. so maybe in addition to the location name one could add some partial hash of the location of the autorestic file.
Would add this in 1.1

from autorestic.

I do have hook that triggers a web-request that the backups are complete. If I now have 5 locations instead of one, they would be triggered 5 times.

This is my issue also. At the moment I'm using / as the source, but have a huge generic list of excludes to filter it down which is ugly and error-prone. For example, I just rolled out to a new host, and missed adding the mount point where the backups were being written to, so I was recursively backing up the backups to the same backup location 😬 You can guess how well that went 😆

from autorestic.

From a backwards compatibility standpoint makes sence, but I'm not sure. creates unexpected behaviour.

Maybe add a dir option to the hooks object where one can specify a diverging cwd.

The update will probably have multiple breaking changes anyways, so maybe do it cleanly directly.

from autorestic.

Do tiu have any config examples for 1.5? Specifically for adding multiple folders?😃

Actually not xD

It's basically just an array

from:
  - /foo/bar
  - /bar/foo

I'll add them today, thanks! forgot to document it xD

from autorestic.

That’s easy!
Maybe also update the examples with version: 2?😎

from autorestic.

While restic supports multiple folders autorestic revolves around the concept that the from key if a directory. That assumtion is all over the code and would be quite tidious work to change that, so I don't think the benefits outweight the pros.
What would be a use case?

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would not expect to getting it done in the next week or so thought :)

from autorestic.

I use it to automate backups of my VPS to S3 storage.☺️ When moving to a new VPS I can simply run the following and always get the latest versions of my files without the need to specify multiple snapshot ids:
restic restore latest /

from autorestic.

Also support for docker has to be considered.

from autorestic.

I use it to automate backups of my VPS to S3 storage.☺️ When moving to a new VPS I can simply run the following and always get the latest versions of my files without the need to specify multiple snapshot ids:
restic restore latest /

Yeah I see. I need to think about it about though, as currently alls the commands are executed in the directory of the from path. Also the hooks.

from autorestic.

Currently, is there any plan to add this feature?

from autorestic.

Will be added soon (1-2 weeks aprox)

Would like to have some feedback first though.

Hooks: currently they are run in the folder of the path.

Posible solutions (i'm open for suggestions):

1. Always run hook scripts from the .autorestic.yml dir.
2. Keep same behaviour as now when the path is only 1, otherwise from config file dir if >1

Pruning & Recovering

right now autorestic find relevant snapshots by filtering by path, that is not doable anymore if there are many of them. My proposal would be to add tags in the form of ar:location:myLocationName to each snapshot, also rename the cron tag to ar:cron so they are all prefixed. I really like this approach, seems clean.

Any ideas/thought?

from autorestic.

It's good to know that you are developing this feature for autorestic! :) It adds a lot of use cases.

Regarding to possible solutions for the hooks situation, I think the second option is better because it maintains backwards compatibility.

But I have another suggestion, the hook's directory is always the first folder in the backup list. With these, we maintain compatibility and we have a single rule for everything. What do you think?

from autorestic.

🎉😃👌

from autorestic.

Do tiu have any config examples for 1.5? Specifically for adding multiple folders?😃

from autorestic.

Will be added soon (1-2 weeks aprox)

Would like to have some feedback first though.

Hooks: currently they are run in the folder of the path.

Posible solutions (i'm open for suggestions):

1. Always run hook scripts from the .autorestic.yml dir.
2. Keep same behaviour as now when the path is only 1, otherwise from config file dir if >1

Pruning & Recovering

right now autorestic find relevant snapshots by filtering by path, that is not doable anymore if there are many of them. My proposal would be to add tags in the form of ar:location:myLocationName to each snapshot, also rename the cron tag to ar:cron so they are all prefixed. I really like this approach, seems clean.

Any ideas/thought?

Could you add the name autorestic.yml without the dot before when searching the path ~/.config/autorestic. That's how most software that I run work.😃

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