Gru

Self hosting backups made easy

Gru is the server part of the DespicableBackup project. Ever wondered how to properly backup your self-hosted services? This is an attempt to solve this problem.

Gru will run on your server, allowing minions to register and flag themselves as ready to receive a backup.

This project aims to provide:

• off-site storage
• multiple backups
• transparent backup system (rsync, duplicity, borg, etc)

How does it work?

Gru will maintain a database of your minions. A minion is a friendly computer accepting connections over ssh.

Let's say you host services for Alice, Bob and you. Bob has a raspberry pi with enough storage to accept your backups and he wants to help.

However:

• Bob might not be willing to let his raspberry run 24/24
• Bob might not know its IP address

This is where gru can help: it provides an API to let the minions register themselves.

This is how you can backup:

• create a token and give it to your friend
• your friend register its minion
• run gru get <tokenid> to get minion data
• use these data to backup with your favorite backup tool (rsync, duplicity, borg, etc)

Getting started

You create a token for him to register on your server:

gru create bob

While the server is running (gru serve, more details below), Bob can register its minion using the client:

minion-backup register -c <config>

This will flag its machine as ready to accept backups. On shutdown, Bob will execute (or a systemd unit):

minion-backup unregister -c <config>

On your side, when you are ready to backup, just run:

gru list

And you will obtain a list of minions (username, ip, port) ready to accept your data.

Advantages

• Minions do not need to run 24/24
• Minions do not need to have a DNS set up

Drawbacks

• If none of you minions are up, you can't backup on a remote (always keep a local backup too)
• Restoring your data requires to contact directly your minions owners

How to run

Gru should always be running to accept minions registrations. The easiest way to achieve this is to enable the systemd unit:

systemctl enable gru

How to build

Building Gru requires rust nightly, the easiest way to get up and running is via rustup. Then simply run:

cargo build --release

Note to maintainers: you can specify configuration path at build time through the "GRU_CONFIG_PATH" environment variable.

Package for debian

cargo install cargo-deb
cargo deb

License

MIT, see COPYING for details.