🛡️ backup.rs

A lightweight, configuration-driven rustic wrapper that turns complex backup pipelines into a single command.

Stop wrestling with brittle, hand-edited shell scripts. backup.rs brings structure to your backups. Drop a backup.toml into any project, run backup init, and you're protected.

---

✨ Features

• Atomic Pipelines: Runs the full lifecycle: Mount → Init → Check → Backup → Forget → Compact.
• Clean UI: Hides the "noise" of raw rustic output behind elegant indicatif spinners.
• Intelligent Failures: If a stage fails, the full logs are captured and displayed immediately for debugging.
• Built-in NFS Mounting: Knows how to mount your NAS shares natively — no external mount-nas script required.
• Zero-Overhead: A single binary you can drop anywhere — perfect for cron jobs.
• Modern Rust: Built with Rust 1.85 (Edition 2024) for safety and speed.

---

🚀 Quick Start

# 1. Install the binary globally
cargo install --path .

# 2. Setup your project directory
cd ~/projects/myapp
backup init          # Generates a smart backup.toml based on your environment

# 3. Tweak & Run
$EDITOR backup.toml  # Set your repo path and password
backup               # Execute the full pipeline

The Experience

  ⠹  Mounting NAS...
  ✓  Mount
  ⠼  Checking Integrity...
  ✓  Check
  ⠴  Backing Up...
  ✓  Backup
  ⠧  Applying Retention Policy...
  ✓  Forget

  ✓ All stages completed successfully.

---

🛠️ Configuration

The backup.toml file is designed to be readable and flexible. Every section is optional, falling back to sensible defaults.

# backup.toml - Configuration for "myapp"
# ---------------------------------------

[repo]
# Path to the rustic repository (local path or rclone/sftp URI)
path     = "/home/alice/nfs/new-backups/rustic/myapp"
# Encryption password. Leave empty ("") for no encryption.
password = ""

[mount]
# Optional: mount a NAS share before backing up.
# The share name is resolved to the correct NFS server and export path
# automatically — no external script required.
# Supported: new-backups, new-documents, isos, pictures, movies, videos,
#            backups, owncloud, lan-share, repos, documents
share = "new-backups"
# user = "alice"   # defaults to $USER if omitted

[backup]
# Paths to include in the snapshot.
sources = ["."]
# Zstd compression level (1-22). 3 is a balanced default.
compression = 3
# Skip any directory containing a file with this name.
exclude_if_present = "ignore"
# Glob patterns. "!" prefix denotes exclusion.
globs = [
    "!**/.git",
    "!**/target/",
    "!**/node_modules/",
]

[retention]
# Snapshot retention policy
daily   = 7
weekly  = 4
monthly = 6

---

⚙️ Usage & Pipeline

Stage	What it does	Skip Flag
Mount	Mounts the configured NAS share natively via NFS	--no-mount
Init	Initialises the repo (auto-skipped if it already exists)	Auto-skip
Check	Verifies repository integrity (rustic check)	--no-check
Backup	Creates a new snapshot (rustic backup)	—
Forget	Applies retention policy (rustic forget --prune)	--no-prune
Compact	Reclaims disk space (rustic prune)	--no-prune

Tip

Use --sudo to prefix rustic commands with doas for privileged operations like accessing restricted system files.

---

🧪 Testing

We take reliability seriously. The test suite ensures that your backup logic is sound without needing to touch your real data.

• Unit Tests: Verify argument generation and config parsing without spawning rustic.
• Snapshot Testing: Powered by insta to ensure CLI arguments never drift unexpectedly.
• E2E Tests: Real-world integration tests that spawn rustic (run with just e2e).

# Run the core unit and integration suite
cargo test

# Review any changes to command-line argument snapshots
cargo insta review

# Run full end-to-end tests (requires rustic on PATH)
just e2e

---

📦 Dependencies

Crate	Role
Clap	CLI parsing with a human touch
Indicatif	Smooth terminal animations & spinners
Anyhow	Ergonomic error reporting
Serde/Toml	Robust configuration handling

---

License

MIT