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Remote backup of local Cloudron backup snapshots with restic & rclone

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

Setup 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. For compression, add --compression auto (or max) to the backup command.

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

Migrate existing backups to compressed backups

For migrating existing repos to compressed repos use these two steps (will take long!)

  • restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder migrate upgrade_repo_v2 -p=/home/USER/resticpw
  • restic -r rclone:REPOSITORY:subfolder prune --repack-uncompressed -p=/home/USER/resticpw

See https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/045_working_with_repos.html#upgrading-the-repository-format-version for details.