Bradford Embedded

Exact Steps - Backups with bup to a USB disk

EDIT: bup backups to a remote location don’t exactly work as you’d expect (I learned this the hard way) so take these steps with a grain of salt

I recently learned about the bup backup tool! It’s pretty neat. It stores backups like git does, but deals with big files in a fairly efficient way.

I like to do backups to an external USB disk so that I can backup more than a single machine to a given disk and so I can take the disk with me to avoid having all my data get lost if there’s a catastrophe at a single location. The downside to using an external disk like this is that I use luks encryption on the disk and it’s not always plugged in, so doing something like daily backups is slightly harder even though it can be overcome via cron jobs and by storing a luks key on my machine(s) (such as I could encrypt a luks key with gnupg using my Yubikey NEO to do the encryption so as to avoid storing a plaintext luks key on my disk).

But regardless, here’s my exact steps for getting started with bup:

  1. Mount hard disk to /mnt/usb (you are strongly encouraged to use luks encryption on this disk!)
  2. mkdir /mnt/usb/.bup && bup init -r /mnt/usb/.bup to create and initialize a .bup directory on the USB disk. You may need to do some sudo and chmod/chgrp action depending on how your USB disk gets mounted. You’ll save the actual files from backups here later.
  3. bup init to create the core bup repo in your home directory, the index will live here
  4. bup index ~/ to index your home directory
  5. bup index /etc to index your /etc directory
  6. bup save -n ${HOSTNAME}-etc -r /mnt/usb/.bup /etc to save the backup of your /etc directory to your USB disk. This backup set will result in a branch named after ${HOSTNAME}-etc, so that if you backup other PCs to this same .bup directory on your USB disk, you’ll be able to see each one in a separate branch.
  7. bup save -n ${HOSTNAME}-home -r /mnt/usb/.bup ~/ to save the backup of your home directory to your USB disk. Similarly, your home directory will go in a ${HOSTNAME}-home branch.

To make a future incremental backup, mount your disk and start from step 4.

If you have more than one user on a given PC, you may want to backup the entire /home directory, or you may want to pick a more descriptive name for the backup branch which includes the username.

Published

15 April 2016