Tutorial: remote backup of local Cloudron backup snapshots with restic / rclone

necrevistonnezr

As suggested here, I turned my old post into a separate topic:

This is what I use for remote backups of my local Cloudron backup snapshots (done by rsync) via restic / rclone to Onedrive.

restic is a robust backup solution for incremental, encrypted, mountable(!) backups to local and remote storage. rclone, an equally robust sync software, is just a "transporter tool" that expands the available remote storages by a lot.

Maybe it can be a starting point and some inspiration for your personal needs.

Tools

Installation

Install tools above via apt
afterwards update to latest version (repo versions are old): sudo restic self-update && sudo rclone selfupdate

Setup rclone

Enter an interactive setup process via rclone config
in my case I use Onedrive as it has 1TB of space coming with my Office 365 subscription
for the rest of this summary, we assume you gave it the repository name "REPOSITORY"
details at https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/

Setup restic

set up a backup repository restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY init
for a subfolder on onedrive just use restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder init
save password that you gave the repository in file /home/USER/resticpw
details at https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/030_preparing_a_new_repo.html#other-services-via-rclone

Setup SSMTP

for receiving backup results, otherwise not needed
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SSMTP

Cloudron Backup settings

Provider: mountpoint
Location: /media/CloudronBackup (<-- obviously adjust to your settings)
this creates a snapshot at /media/CloudronBackup/snapshot for the current backup
Storage Format: rsync
Adjust schedule and retention to your liking

Backup, Prune and Check scripts

`restic-cron-backup.sh`: The actual backup

#!/bin/bash
d=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
if pidof -o %PPID -x “$0”; then
echo “$(date “+%d.%m.%Y %T”) Exit, already running.”
exit 1
fi
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder backup /media/CloudronBackup/snapshot -p=/home/USER/resticpw
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder forget --keep-monthly 12 --keep-weekly 5 --keep-daily 14 -p=/home/USER/resticpw
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder check --read-data-subset=2% -p=/home/USER/resticpw
exit

First line does the backup (incremental, encrypted), second line is the backup retention, third line checks a random 2 % of all data for errors.
Note that I only backup the /snapshot folder as all versioning is done by restic.

`restic-cron-prune.sh`: Pruning unused files in the backup

#!/bin/bash
d=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
if pidof -o %PPID -x “$0”; then
echo “$(date “+%d.%m.%Y %T”) Exit, already running.”
exit 1
fi
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder prune -p=/home/USER/resticpw
exit

removes unused data from the repository, I run this once a week

`restic-cron-check.sh`: thorough health check of the backups

#!/bin/bash
d=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
if pidof -o %PPID -x “$0”; then
echo “$(date “+%d.%m.%Y %T”) Exit, already running.”
exit 1
fi
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder check --read-data -p=/home/USER/resticpw
exit

checks all data for errors, I run this once a week

Crontab

30 2 * * * sh /home/USER/restic-cron-backup.sh | mailx -s "Restic Backup Results" server@mydomain.com
1 5 1 * * sh /home/USER/restic-cron-prune.sh | mailx -s "Restic Prune Results" server@mydomain.com
1 8 1 * * sh /home/USER/restic-cron-check.sh | mailx -s "Restic Full Check Results" server@mydomain.com

Backup daily at 2:30, prune and check once a week. Receive results to specified mail

Mount backups

Just to be complete: You can mount restic backups locally like
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder mount /media/resticmount/ -p=/home/USER/resticpw && cd /media/resticmount
obviously adjust /media/resticmount/to your settings; allows you to browse and copy from full snapshots for each backup

List backups

For listing all available snapshots use
restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder snapshots -p=/home/USER/resticpw

timconsidine

@necrevistonnezr nice article.
Great fan of rclone.
I use it with wasabi and scaleway.

Don't know restic so I'm off to learn.

Becoming fan of https://ntfy.sh : great for adding into scripts run by cron to confirm running/script results/server status (e.g. df -h)

robi

@timconsidine said in Tutorial: remote backup of local Cloudron backup snapshots with restic / rclone:

Becoming fan of https://ntfy.sh :

Nice find, that's totally self-hostable, you should add it to the list!

We had several instances where we needed a way to have notifications for cloudron apps/events. This would do the trick!

It can also be made a feature request for box notifications to support an API or curl call for admins.

timconsidine

@robi I've been meaning to have a go at packaging it.
But I stumbled on something (I forget what).
Will try again.
And will open a wishlist for someone more talented than me to have a crack.

necrevistonnezr

added command to list all available snapshots to original post

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