Tinybackup

Tinybackup is a tiny bash wrapper powered by Kopia, making backups simple and easily scriptable. It handles repository setup, retention policies, ignore rules and pre/post hooks from a minimal config file.

Features

• Easy configuration and usage
• Tiny, single-file bash script
• Automatic repository initialization and connection
• Several supported repository backends: local, S3, SFTP, rclone
• Retention policies and ignore rules
• Backup hooks (e.g., stop services, dump databases)
• Backup mount for content browsing (via FUSE)
• Integrated Kopia web-ui or server access

Requirements

Tinybackup requires Kopia. Install it via:

• your package manager, if Kopia is packaged for your distribution,
• the included script, which installs the latest static binary:

./install-kopia

Installation

No installation needed: just run ./tinybackup from the cloned directory.
To call it from anywhere, symlink it into your PATH (config stays in the cloned conf.d/):

ln -s "$(pwd -P)/tinybackup" /usr/local/bin/tinybackup

For bash completion (requires the bash-completion package), symlink it too:

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions
ln -s "$(pwd -P)/completions/tinybackup.bash" /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/tinybackup

To uninstall, remove links:

rm /usr/local/bin/tinybackup /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/tinybackup

Usage

Configuration

Configure your system backup in conf.d/${HOSTNAME%%.*}.conf, for example:

# Repository configuration
REPO_TYPE='sftp'
SFTP_USER='tiny'
SFTP_HOST='192.168.10.10'
SFTP_KEY='/home/tiny/.ssh/id_ed25519'
SFTP_PATH='/mnt/backup/repo'

# Backup configuration
PRE_BACKUP_HOOK='systemctl stop nginx'
POST_BACKUP_HOOK='systemctl start nginx'
RETENTION_CONFIG=('latest=10' 'daily=7' 'weekly=4')
TO_BACKUP=('/etc' '/var' '/home')

Important

For SFTP, trust the server ECDSA host key once beforehand, as root (see kopia#2948):

ssh -o HostKeyAlgorithms=ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 -i /home/tiny/.ssh/id_ed25519 tiny@192.168.10.10 -- exit

For all available configuration variables and explanation, see provided presets here.
To use a specific file, pass it as option: ./tinybackup -c /path/other.conf backup.

Execution

The first backup creates the repository if missing (local repository directory must exist):

./tinybackup backup                             # Create a snapshot
./tinybackup list                               # List available snapshots
./tinybackup restore <ID> /restore/path         # Restore a snapshot (ID shown by list) to a directory
./tinybackup restore <ID>/nginx /tmp/nginx.zip  # Restore a sub-directory to a zip archive

The repository password is prompted on first connection only.
For a non-interactive first run (e.g. cron), export KOPIA_PASSWORD before executing any command.

Warning

The script re-executes itself as root with sudo (set FORCE_ROOT=false to disable).

For all other commands (mount, check, policy, maintenance, raw, web-ui, etc.) and options, see:

./tinybackup --help