probackup-nl / drp

Disaster recovery protection for Arch Linux on UEFI

Bare metal disaster backup and recovery plan for Arch Linux.

USAGE: drp [--prepare /dev/<UNMOUNTED_DESTINATION_DEVICE>]

DRP keeps:

• hourly backups for the past 24 hours,
• daily backups for the past month,
• weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full.

DRP:

• creates a (UEFI) bootable recovery on the block device
• updates the bootable kernel to keep up with your Linux kernel version
• saves target disk space by using BTRFS snapshots
• uses a systemd service and timer

REQUIREMENTS: 2nd block device (f.e. USB drive), UEFI, Arch Linux, systemd-boot, btrfs, dhcpcd, mkinitcpio-nfs-utils, <...more see source code...>

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Motivation

This project started for several reasons:

• ReaR is too immature for Arch Linux+UEFI,
• I couldn't find another disaster recovery solution for Linux that is low on dependencies,
• to mimic Time Machine,
• to optimise for SSD/nvme/flash storage,
• to be low on (destination) disk space (hope that a btrfs snapshot without changes consumes less disk space then re-creating all directories and hard-links for files.

ToDo

• thin weekly snapshots when low on disk space
• verify rescue medium configs file integrity before usage (as well as the MD5sum file itself)
• store textual configs multiple times in different compressed formats to prevent smart controllers from de-duplicating the bit-stream (and have backup copies in place)
• at config file or integrity errors auto fall back to alternative (compressed) copies
• cleanup logging / use journald logging
• backup:snapshot source
• backup:search subvolumes on source and snapshot these too
• recover:ssd detected, ask for secure erase?
• recover:no erase && partitions available -> rsync restore instead of copy