restic systemd units

This is a collection of systemd units for managing backups with restic.

Installing

You need a daemon user called restic. You can create one with:

sudo adduser --system --no-create-home --disabled-login --group restic

To install the systemd units and associated support files:

make && sudo make install && sudo systemctl daemon-reload

What gets installed?

A bunch of systemd units:

/etc/systemd/system/restic-backup-daily@.timer
/etc/systemd/system/restic-backup-monthly@.timer
/etc/systemd/system/restic-backup@.service
/etc/systemd/system/restic-backup.target
/etc/systemd/system/restic-backup-weekly@.timer

/etc/systemd/system/restic-check-daily@.timer
/etc/systemd/system/restic-check-monthly@.timer
/etc/systemd/system/restic-check@.service
/etc/systemd/system/restic-check-weekly@.timer

And this tmpfiles.d configuration, which ensures that /run/restic and /var/cache/restic exist:

/etc/tmpfiles.d/restic.conf

And a helper script, used for manually running restic against the backup profiles used by these units:

/usr/local/bin/restic-helper

Configuration

Put environment variables common to all your backups in /etc/restic/restic.conf. For example, on my system I have:

# A pointer to your restic password. This can be set globally here
# or per-backup profile.
RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE=/etc/restic/password

Create one or more backup profiles as subdirectories of /etc/restic. For example, if you're going to be backing up /home, you might create /etc/restic/home with the following configuration in /etc/restic/home/restic.conf:

# What to back up?
BACKUP_DIR=/home

# Where to store backups?
RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/backups

# Arguments for the backup command
RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS="--tag home"

# Arguments for the forget command
RESTIC_FORGET_ARGS="--tag home --keep-daily 2 --keep-weekly 2 --keep-monthly 1"

Enabling backups

Assuming that you have /etc/restic/home configured as above, then to schedule daily backups of /home:

systemctl enable --now restic-backup-daily@home.timer

Or to schedule weekly backups:

systemctl enable --now restic-backup-weekly@home.timer

forget and prune are done automatically after the Sunday backup. See restic-backup for the specific logic.

Scheduling checks

You can schedule a check (see the restic docs for details and caveats) daily using, e.g.:

systemctl enable --now restic-check-weekly@home.timer

Note: You are on your own for setting up a mechanism to be notified for backup and check failures. Consider adding an OnFailure clause to both .service files.

Running manually

Assuming that you have /etc/restic/home configured as above, then to force a run of the /home backup:

systemctl start --no-block restic-backup@home.service

Inspecting logs

You can watch the logs for a given backup using:

journalctl -f -u restic-backup@home.service

or browse the full output with:

journalctl -u restic-backup@home.service

Lockfiles

These units use the flock binary to serialize multiple instances of the same template unit. This means if you start two backups in parallel...

systemctl start restic-backup@home restic-backup@database

...they will actually run one after the other instead of running at the same time.

Manually running restic commands

The restic-helper command reads the environment configuration from /etc/restic/restic.conf and the current directory. You can use this if you want to manually run restic commands against one of your backup profiles. For example:

# cd /etc/restic/home
# sudo -u restic restic-helper snapshots
* reading configuration from /etc/restic/restic.conf
* reading configuration from ./restic.conf
password is correct
ID        Date                 Host    Tags        Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1dc1d283  2018-03-03 00:00:37  myhost  home        /home
9dbd3830  2018-03-04 00:00:46  myhost  home        /home
8938235d  2018-03-05 00:00:40  myhost  home        /home
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3 snapshots