Photography Backup

Docker container that uses Borg and rclone to create backups deployed in Google Cloud Storage.

Requirements

• A Google account with a GCP project (billing must be enabled)
• gcloud CLI to configure your GCP authentication
• terraform to provision the required resources on GCP
• docker to build and run the backup container

Configure Cloud Storage

Before using this project, you have to configure your GCP authentication using gcloud CLI:

gcloud auth application-default login

Create a .auto.tfvars file inside provision/ directory with the following variables set:

google_project_id = "<GCP_PROJECT_ID>"
google_region     = "<GCP_REGION>"
google_zone       = "<GCP_ZONE>"

Initialize Terraform locally and start the provisioning:

cd provision
terraform init
terraform apply

Once the provision ends, you can re-initialize Terraform to move the global state in your newly created buckets. To do that, configure your backend by creating a .gcs.tfbackend file inside provision/ directory with the following variables set:

bucket = "<YOUR_BUCKET_NAME>"
prefix = "terraform/state"

Then, re-initialize Terraform to move the state on Google Cloud Storage:

terraform init -backend-config=.gcs.tfbackend

Backup Service

Configure Backup Environment

To boostrap your environment, launch the following commands from the repository folder:

mkdir -p config/
mkdir -p cache/
cp env.example .env
chmod 600 .env

Docker Compose uses automatically the .env file. You must update included values as follows:

• DATA_PATH: is the folder you want to backup. Example: /home/user/Pictures.
• BORG_PASSPHRASE: is the key used to encrypt Borg repository. Check Borg documentation for more details.
• RCLONE_REMOTE_PATH: is the remote storage path in rcloud format. Example: REMOTE_NAME:BUCKET_NAME.
• CROND_SCHEDULE: is the schedule used by crond to execute the backup. Example: 0 2 * * * (every day at 2 AM).

Start the Container

Once the configuration is done, you can run the container as a service that will execute the backup based on the CROND_SCHEDULE. If the backup is not initialized, the container will create a new repository in the rclone mount folder.

To run the container as a service, use the following command:

docker compose up -d

Extract the Archive

To extract the backup archive you must stop any running container. Once the container is stopped, you can use the following helper:

docker compose run --rm -ti backup extract.sh

Development

We accept external contributions even though the project is mostly designed for personal needs. If you think some parts can be exposed with a more generic interface, feel free to open a GitHub issue to discuss your suggestion.