Autorestic is a wrapper around the amazing [restic](https://restic.net/). While being amazing the restic cli can be a bit overwhelming and difficoult to manage if you have many different location that you want to backup to multiple locations. This utility is aimed at making this easier 🙂
First we need to configure our locations and backends. Simply create a `.autorestic.yml` either in your home directory of in the folder from which you will execute `autorestic`.
Then we check if everything is correct by running the `check` command. We will pass the `-a` (or `--all`) to tell autorestic to check all the locations.
If we would check only one location we could run the following: `autorestic check -l home`. Otherwise simpply check all locations with `autorestic check -a`
Note that the data is automatically encrypted on the server. The key will be generated and added to your config file. Every backend will have a separate key. You should keep a copy of the keys somewhere in case your server dies. Otherwise DATA IS LOST!
This will restore all the locations to the selected target. If for one location there are more than one backends specified autorestic will take the first one.
Autorestic can update itself! Super handy right? Simply run `autorestic update` and we will check for you if there are updates for restic and autorestic and install them if necessary.
A location simply a folder on your machine that restic will backup. The paths can be relative from the config file. A location can have multiple backends, so that the data is secured across multiple servers.
Autorestic supports declaring snapshot policies for location to avoid keeping old snapshot around if you don't need them.
This is based on [Restic's snapshots policies](https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/060_forget.html#removing-snapshots-according-to-a-policy), and can be enabled for each location as shown below:
Pruning can be triggered using `autorestic forget -a`, for all locations, or selectively with `autorestic forget -l <location>`. **please note that contrary to the restic CLI, `restic forget` will call `restic prune` internally.**
Run with the `--dry-run` flag to only print information about the process without actually pruning the snapshots. This is especially useful for debugging or testing policies:
```
$ autorestic forget -a --dry-run --verbose
Configuring Backends
local : Done ✓
Removing old shapshots according to policy
etc ▶ local : Removing old spnapshots… ⏳
etc ▶ local : Running in dry-run mode, not touching data
etc ▶ local : Forgeting old snapshots… ⏳Applying Policy: all snapshots within 2d of the newest
If you want to exclude certain files or folders it done easily by specifiyng the right flags in the location you desire to filter. The flags are taken straight from the [restic cli exclude rules](https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/040_backup.html#excluding-files).
Sometimes you might want to stop an app/db before backing up data and start the service again after the backup has completed. This is what the hooks are made for. Simply add them to your location config. You can have as many commands as you wish.
