egeexyz / backup-buddy

Back up your things

Backup-Buddy

Backup your things with Rsync and NodeJS!

Backup-Buddy is a convenience wrapper written in Node that uses Rsync to asynchronously back up your files and folders in parallel. It's super quick!

How It Works

Backup-buddy is a program written in NodeJS that parses a yaml file, constructs a list of arguments for rsync to run, and executes rsync processes for each backup path listed. This means if you have 10 folders to back up, Backup-buddy will invoke 10 rsync processes at the same time. Use with care!

Backup-buddy's uses yaml definition files to build commands that rsync will use. An example of a job file can be found here.

How To Use

From the terminal, first install it:

npm install -g backup-buddy

backup-buddy my_backup_file.yml

Backup-buddy's behavior should be identical to rsync's.

For example, adding /etc/ or /etc/* will back up all files (including folders & sub-folders) but not the etc folder itself. Adding /etc (without the trailing / or *) will backup the folder and everything inside it.

backup-buddy's Issues

Make into an actual CLI

Currently, backup buddy is an index file that instantiates a JavaScript object which parses a file.

Turning it into an actual cli makes it so we can check the input to make sure it's a usable file with the proper fields and etc.

Compression is awkward with wildcards

Since the method to compress a folder for backup uses the backup path for the filename, any wildcard (or otherwise extraneous character) is added to the tail-end of the path, it becomes part of the archive name. For example:

backupPaths:
  - /var/log/dmesg*

Will create a file called dmesg*.tar.gz.

The file is still a regular ole tar file, but the name is not what a user would expect.

Backup-buddy should create the destination folder

If you run backup buddy with a job file with a desired destination path that does not exist, backup buddy explodes and stops the process.

Ideally, backup buddy should create the folder and throw an info so the user knows what's going on. Even better would be if that info arrived at the end of the process so it doesn't get lost in the noise.

Also, a failed attempt to access a folder should not stop the entire process. Each backup folder runs asynchronously so there should be some try/catching to prevent it from crashing the program.

Generate a job file definition stub

The yaml job file definition is very simple and it should be easy to spit out an example at the cli so that an operator may modify it and make their own from it.

This feature is needed for backup-buddy to become useful for most people, I think. The yaml definition is simple but it's not obvious first without seeing it.