back-up

Description

back-up is a very simple utility for backing up directories of files.

Features

• Awfully simple.
• Configured with a YAML configuration file, where you can specify what directories should be backed up, and where the backups should be stored.
• For each directory to back up, it checks whether its contents have changed since the last time it was backed up. If not, then back-up will not waste disk space by creating another copy. This means that it can simply be called at regular intervals, e.g. scheduled with cron or Task Scheduler to run every 1 hour or so.

Installation

pip install back-up

Configuration

back-up reads the configuration from file ~/.config/back-up/back-up.yaml. That is where you should specify all the directories you want backed up. See sample back-up.yaml file for available configuration options.

It is also possible, albeit usually impractical, to specify all the parameters on the command line.

Usage

usage: back-up [-h] [--backups-dir PATH] [--log-file PATH]
               [--logging-level {CRITICAL,ERROR,WARNING,INFO,DEBUG}]
               [--to-backup NAME=PATH [NAME=PATH ...]] [--config-file PATH]
               [--archive-format FORMAT] [--version] [--verbose] [--quiet]

Utility for backing up directories.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --backups-dir PATH    set the directory to dump the backups to; this is the
                        'general' backups directory, i.e. specific
                        directories that you back up will have their own
                        subdirectories in there
  --log-file PATH       set the file to dump logs to
  --logging-level {CRITICAL,ERROR,WARNING,INFO,DEBUG}
                        set logging verbosity
  --to-backup NAME=PATH [NAME=PATH ...]
                        set the directories to back up; PATH is the directory
                        to back up, NAME is an arbitrary identifier used to
                        organize the backup files in the backup directory, so
                        it's easier to find the thing you want to restore;
                        sample value: 'DOCUMENTS=~/Documents' (the tilde will
                        be expanded appropriately, backups will be dumped
                        under '<backups_dir>/DOCUMENTS/...')
  --config-file PATH    where to take config from; command line arguments
                        have priority though; default: '~/.config/back-
                        up/back-up.yaml'
  --archive-format FORMAT
                        what format to store the backups in; default: 'zip'
  --version, -V         show version and exit
  --verbose, -v         increase verbosity of console output
  --quiet, -q           decrease verbosity of console output

Development

Prepare environment

python3 -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install --editable .
pip install coverage pycodestyle

Run tests, generate coverage reports etc.

coverage run --source back_up/ -m unittest discover tests/
coverage report
coverage html
pycodestyle back_up/ tests/

# same thing but on one line:
coverage run --source back_up/ -m unittest discover tests/ \
  && coverage report \
  && coverage html \
  && pycodestyle back_up/ tests/

TODO

• Add some sort of cleanup capability for really old backups.