8.7 KiB
| title | eleventyNavigation | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How to make per-application backups |
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Multiple backup configurations
You may find yourself wanting to create different backup policies for different applications on your system or even for different backup repositories. For instance, you might want one backup configuration for your database data directory and a different configuration for your user home directories. Or one backup configuration for your local backups with a different configuration for your remote repository.
The way to accomplish that is pretty simple: Create multiple separate
configuration files and place each one in a /etc/borgmatic.d/ directory. For
instance, for applications:
sudo mkdir /etc/borgmatic.d
sudo generate-borgmatic-config --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/app1.yaml
sudo generate-borgmatic-config --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/app2.yaml
Or, for repositories:
sudo mkdir /etc/borgmatic.d
sudo generate-borgmatic-config --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/repo1.yaml
sudo generate-borgmatic-config --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/repo2.yaml
When you set up multiple configuration files like this, borgmatic will run
each one in turn from a single borgmatic invocation. This includes, by
default, the traditional /etc/borgmatic/config.yaml as well.
Each configuration file is interpreted independently, as if you ran borgmatic for each configuration file one at a time. In other words, borgmatic does not perform any merging of configuration files by default. If you'd like borgmatic to merge your configuration files, for instance to avoid duplication of settings, see below about configuration includes.
Additionally, the ~/.config/borgmatic.d/ directory works the same way as
/etc/borgmatic.d.
If you need even more customizability, you can specify alternate configuration
paths on the command-line with borgmatic's --config flag. (See borgmatic --help for more information.) For instance, if you want to schedule your
various borgmatic backups to run at different times, you'll need multiple
entries in your scheduling software of
choice,
each entry using borgmatic's --config flag instead of relying on
/etc/borgmatic.d.
Configuration includes
Once you have multiple different configuration files, you might want to share common configuration options across these files with having to copy and paste them. To achieve this, you can put fragments of common configuration options into a file, and then include or inline that file into one or more borgmatic configuration files.
Let's say that you want to include common retention configuration across all of your configuration files. You could do that in each configuration file with the following:
location:
...
retention:
!include /etc/borgmatic/common_retention.yaml
And then the contents of common_retention.yaml could be:
keep_hourly: 24
keep_daily: 7
To prevent borgmatic from trying to load these configuration fragments by
themselves and complaining that they are not valid configuration files, you
should put them in a directory other than /etc/borgmatic.d/. (A subdirectory
is fine.)
When a configuration include is a relative path, borgmatic loads it from either the current working directory or from the directory containing the file doing the including.
Note that this form of include must be a YAML value rather than a key. For example, this will not work:
location:
...
# Don't do this. It won't work!
!include /etc/borgmatic/common_retention.yaml
But if you do want to merge in a YAML key and its values, keep reading!
Include merging
If you need to get even fancier and merge in common configuration options, you
can perform a YAML merge of included configuration using the YAML << key.
For instance, here's an example of a main configuration file that pulls in
retention and consistency options via a single include:
<<: !include /etc/borgmatic/common.yaml
location:
...
This is what common.yaml might look like:
retention:
keep_hourly: 24
keep_daily: 7
consistency:
checks:
- name: repository
Once this include gets merged in, the resulting configuration would have all
of the location options from the original configuration file and the
retention and consistency options from the include.
Prior to borgmatic version 1.6.0, when there's a section collision between the
local file and the merged include, the local file's section takes precedence.
So if the retention section appears in both the local file and the include
file, the included retention is ignored in favor of the local retention.
But see below about deep merge in version 1.6.0+.
Note that this << include merging syntax is only for merging in mappings
(configuration options and their values). But if you'd like to include a
single value directly, please see the section above about standard includes.
Additionally, there is a limitation preventing multiple << include merges
per section. So for instance, that means you can do one << merge at the
global level, another << within each configuration section, etc. (This is a
YAML limitation.)
Deep merge
New in version 1.6.0 borgmatic performs a deep merge of merged include files, meaning that values are merged at all levels in the two configuration files. This allows you to include common configuration—up to full borgmatic configuration files—while overriding only the parts you want to customize.
For instance, here's an example of a main configuration file that pulls in two retention options via an include and then overrides one of them locally:
<<: !include /etc/borgmatic/common.yaml
location:
...
retention:
keep_daily: 5
This is what common.yaml might look like:
retention:
keep_hourly: 24
keep_daily: 7
Once this include gets merged in, the resulting configuration would have a
keep_hourly value of 24 and an overridden keep_daily value of 5.
When there's an option collision between the local file and the merged include, the local file's option takes precedence.
New in version 1.6.1 Colliding list values are appended together.
Configuration overrides
In more complex multi-application setups, you may want to override particular borgmatic configuration file options at the time you run borgmatic. For instance, you could reuse a common configuration file for multiple applications, but then set the repository for each application at runtime. Or you might want to try a variant of an option for testing purposes without actually touching your configuration file.
Whatever the reason, you can override borgmatic configuration options at the
command-line via the --override flag. Here's an example:
borgmatic create --override location.remote_path=/usr/local/bin/borg1
What this does is load your configuration files, and for each one, disregard
the configured value for the remote_path option in the location section,
and use the value of /usr/local/bin/borg1 instead.
You can even override multiple values at once. For instance:
borgmatic create --override section.option1=value1 section.option2=value2
This will accomplish the same thing:
borgmatic create --override section.option1=value1 --override section.option2=value2
Note that each value is parsed as an actual YAML string, so you can even set list values by using brackets. For instance:
borgmatic create --override location.repositories=[test1.borg,test2.borg]
Or even a single list element:
borgmatic create --override location.repositories=[/root/test.borg]
If your override value contains special YAML characters like colons, then you'll need quotes for it to parse correctly:
borgmatic create --override location.repositories="['user@server:test.borg']"
There is not currently a way to override a single element of a list without replacing the whole list.
Note that if you override an option of the list type (like
location.repositories), you do need to use the [ ] list syntax. See the
configuration
reference for
which options are list types. (YAML list values look like - this with an
indentation and a leading dash.)
Be sure to quote your overrides if they contain spaces or other characters that your shell may interpret.
An alternate to command-line overrides is passing in your values via environment variables.