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If someone is looking at trying attic and wants something a little nicer to configure and run than the very basic shell script from attic's Quick Start[1], chec

by witten 12y ago

If someone is looking at trying attic and wants something a little nicer to configure and run than the very basic shell script from attic's Quick Start[1], check out the wrapper script I wrote to make this a little easier[2]. It's still somewhat "1.0" right now, but it does the basics for me. See the included sample config files for an idea of how the configuration works.[3] [1] https://attic-backup.org/quickstart.html#automating-backups https://attic-backup.org/quickstart.html#automating-backups [2] http://torsion.org/hg/atticmatic/file/tip http://torsion.org/hg/atticmatic/file/tip [3] http://torsion.org/hg/atticmatic/file/tip/sample/config http://torsion.org/hg/atticmatic/file/tip/sample/config

anarcat 12y ago
i'm curious: why isn't this part of attic in the first place? i have been working with the bup folks for a while to try to make a similar interface, and i was wondering what was your experience with upstream...
- witten 12y ago
  Great question. I do think this should be part of what attic provides out of the box, but I still really wanted to use attic despite the fact that it doesn't include this sort of functionality. I'll try contacting the attic devs and see what they say about it.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    Your wrapper is only lacking one critical feature I'd love. I am currently using rsnapshot and while its big issue is lack of encryption, it is able to run scripts on remote hosts to pull backups from them. This is a big deal to me since I can then script things like MySQL/Postgres backups, etc. on my master server, rather than having to configure each host individually. It's possible that this is a bad way to run things since my master server is then a SPoF. I do trust this server more since I monitor it much more closely, than I would a dozen random VPS's with a half-dozen different providers.
    - witten 12y ago
      Push vs. pull for backups is an interesting philosophical issue, and there's some good discussion of it below. For many setups, pull really doesn't make sense. For example, one of the machines I backup is my personal laptop, and I back it up to a completely untrusted VPS. Therefore I want to be able to encrypt locally and push that encrypted data to the remote VPS. Pulling wouldn't work here, because then I'd have to hand the keys to my laptop to the VPS. The scenario you're describing, however, sounds like the opposite in terms of trust. And in that case pull may make sense. However it doesn't sound like attic itself natively supports that sort of config. I could envision a sort of hybrid approach where the local machine encrypts to a local attic repository, and then the remote backup server pulls a copy of it. There's nothing stopping you from setting that up, either with attic as-is or with this wrapper script.
mappu 12y ago
I made my own wrapper as well: http://code.ivysaur.me/atticinst.html http://code.ivysaur.me/atticinst.html Although upon reading yours, it looks they perform somewhat different tasks.

by witten 12y ago

anarcat 12y ago

i'm curious: why isn't this part of attic in the first place? i have been working with the bup folks for a while to try to make a similar interface, and i was wondering what was your experience with upstream...

witten 12y ago
Great question. I do think this should be part of what attic provides out of the box, but I still really wanted to use attic despite the fact that it doesn't include this sort of functionality. I'll try contacting the attic devs and see what they say about it.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Your wrapper is only lacking one critical feature I'd love. I am currently using rsnapshot and while its big issue is lack of encryption, it is able to run scripts on remote hosts to pull backups from them. This is a big deal to me since I can then script things like MySQL/Postgres backups, etc. on my master server, rather than having to configure each host individually. It's possible that this is a bad way to run things since my master server is then a SPoF. I do trust this server more since I monitor it much more closely, than I would a dozen random VPS's with a half-dozen different providers.
  - witten 12y ago
    Push vs. pull for backups is an interesting philosophical issue, and there's some good discussion of it below. For many setups, pull really doesn't make sense. For example, one of the machines I backup is my personal laptop, and I back it up to a completely untrusted VPS. Therefore I want to be able to encrypt locally and push that encrypted data to the remote VPS. Pulling wouldn't work here, because then I'd have to hand the keys to my laptop to the VPS. The scenario you're describing, however, sounds like the opposite in terms of trust. And in that case pull may make sense. However it doesn't sound like attic itself natively supports that sort of config. I could envision a sort of hybrid approach where the local machine encrypts to a local attic repository, and then the remote backup server pulls a copy of it. There's nothing stopping you from setting that up, either with attic as-is or with this wrapper script.

mappu 12y ago

I made my own wrapper as well: http://code.ivysaur.me/atticinst.html http://code.ivysaur.me/atticinst.html Although upon reading yours, it looks they perform somewhat different tasks.