dotback

dotback backs up your dotfiles.

• dotback
  • Features
  • Configuration
  • Usage
    • Backup
  • Unix philosophy
  • It does not
  • It does
  • Installation
  • Contribution

Features

• A single binary, no runtime environments or large dependencies.
• Designed with Unix philosophy, it only does backup.
• No symlinks, only simple copying.

Installation

You can download the binary from the releases section.

If you have the Go compiler installed, you can also install it using the following command.

go install github.com/pspiagicw/gox@latest

If you use gox to manage your go binaries, you can run.

gox install github.com/pspiagicw/gox@latest

Configuration

It tries to find the default configuration in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dotback/backup.toml.

• It should have a storeDir variable defined.
• It can optionally provide a after-backup list of commands to run.

Note

You can also run dotback --example-config to get an example config file.

# A folder to store the backup, it will be created if it does not exist.
storeDir = "~/.local/state/backup"

# All commands should be defined by the user.
# It can be left empty or omitted.

after-backup = [
    "scp -r ...",
    "rsync ....",
    "tar -xvzf ..."
]


# A backup rule has [backup.<rule-name>] format.
# It should contain a `location` parameter.
[backup.nvim]
location = "~/.config/nvim"

[backup.neomutt]
location = "~/.config/neomutt"

# Backup location can also be a file.
[backup.gitconfig]
location = "~/.gitconfig"

Note

You can run dotback config to get info about the current config.

Usage

flags

dotback provides the following flags.

• --config : Path to a alternate config file. (Should be absolute path)
• --example-config : Print an example config file.

backup

Simply run dotback backup to backup configured in the config file.

• It would backup everything to storeDir.
• This ignores .git and .gitignore files within any backup folder.

• You can also specify selective rules for backup.

# Only backup neovim config
dotback backup nvim

• You can also provide --ignore flag to ignore selective rules for backup.

# Backup everything except neovim and neomutt
dotback backup --ignore nvim neomutt

• You can provide --dry-run flag to not actually backup anything.

# Don't actually backup anything
dotback backup --dry-run

Unix philosophy

dotback is not a full fledged backup solution for your dotfiles. It is a simple tool with a simple use.

it does not

• Provide incremental backup (Use rsync or borg)
• Provide automatic backup (Use systemd or cron for that)
• Sync with different machines (Use syncthing for that)
• Install your dotfiles on a new machine.

it does

• Copy the file or folder into the storeDir.
• Provide ability to run scripts before and after running the backups.

You can see the backup.yml example file(in the repo) for more reference.

Contribution

It is a very highly opinated tool. It does not fit in everybody's workflow. But if it does, please do share your support and love.

Anybody is welcome to contribute and extend this project on GitHub.