🔧 Backer

A small backup control plane for self-hosted infrastructure

Currently working on branch develop/mils1 for Release v0.1.0

Backer is a modular backup orchestration system composed of:

• backer — Python CLI application
• backerd — Execution Daemon
• Backer Desktop - graphical control interface (planned)

It is designed for homelabs, NAS environments, and small private infrastructure.

Up to now, under the hood, it uses rsync, a powerful command-line utility used to efficiently synchronize and transfer files between local and remote directories. It minimizes data transfer by using delta-transfer algorithm that only copies the specific portion of files that have changed.

Since it relies on rsync, Backer is strongly Unix-driven, but for the future I am planning to introduce also Windows support either through WSL, or by rewriting an rsync-clone by myself (as good as possible).

🧱 Architecture

                ┌────────────────────┐
                │  Backer Desktop    │
                └──────────┬─────────┘
                           │
                           │
┌────────────┐      ┌──────▼──────┐
│   backer   │ ───► │   backerd   │
│    (CLI)   │      │  (daemon)   │
└────────────┘      └──────┬──────┘
                           │
                           ▼
                      Backup Jobs
                      Logs
                      Notifications

Both the CLI and the Desktop application communicate with the daemon via the provided REST API, therefore they can be viewd as clients while the daemon owns the execution of Jobs.

In Backer terminology a Job is a scheduled backup task that runs automatically. Each job is defined declaratively via a configuration YAML file (which can contains multiple job definition).

# yaml-language-server: $schema=config.schema.json

backup:
  targets:
    simple_backup:
      remote:
        host: nas.domain
        user: admin
        password_file: .rsync_pass
        dest:
          module: backup
          folder: home
      rsync:
        excludes:
          - **/node_modules/*
          - **/.cache/*
          - **/cache/*
          - **/*.tmp
        sources:
          - /home/
      notification:
        email:
          from: user.email@gmail.com
          to:
            - user.email@gmail.com
          password: password

The previous is a non-exhaustive example of a YAML configuration file for a single job called simple_backup (also known as Target). For a better overview of all possible configurations see the example file config-example.yml.

🚧 Roadmap

Planned, In progress and Ready features, as well as releases can be viewed in the Backer Project

📦 Installation

Coming Soon ...