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Restic Backup

Running your own server always requires a reliable backup to secure your data. With this backup container, obtaining a daily backup is easy. We chose the backup software Restic for its numerous advantages:

  • Target: Restic supports multiple backup targets, including S3, Backblaze, BorgBase, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
  • Speed: Backup your data at lightning speed.
  • Encryption: Your data is securely encrypted. Without the encryption key, it remains inaccessible.
  • Deduplication: Duplicate files or file fragments are saved only once, reducing the amount of data transmitted.
  • Snapshots: Forget about regular full backups; only the changes since the last backup need to be saved.
  • Reliability: With 24k stars on GitHub and nearly a decade of development, restic is exceptionally robust.

Simple and Secure Offsite Backups of your SeaTable Server with BorgBase

Installation

This article explains how to implement a restic backup for your Seafile server.

Change the .env file

To install the restic backup container, include restic.yml in the COMPOSE_FILE variable within your .env file. This instructs Docker to download the required images.

Simply copy and paste () the following code into your command line:

sed -i "s/COMPOSE_FILE='\(.*\)'/COMPOSE_FILE='\1,restic.yml'/" /opt/seafile-compose/.env

Configure your backup

Every backup is encrypted with a password. Please make sure that you store this password at a save place, otherwise your backup will be worthless if you might need it.

pw=$(pwgen -s 40 1) && echo "Generated restic password: ${pw}"

The generated restic password needs to be added to your .env file. Copy and paste the following command:

echo -e "\n# restic-backup" >> /opt/seafile-compose/.env
echo "RESTIC_PASSWORD=${pw}" >> /opt/seafile-compose/.env

Local Backups are better then no backups

This configuration will create daily snapshots including database dumps at your host system at /opt/restic/local. This is a good start, but of cause we recommend that you store your backup remotely.

Secure offsite backup with BorgBase

For small Seafile servers, we could recommend the service BorgBase. They offer up to 10GB of Backup storage for free and the setup can be done in one minute.

  1. Register at https://borgbase.com.
  2. Create a new repo, choose any name and set the Repo Format: Restic.
  3. Save the provided repository url and use it as RESTIC_REPOSITORY.

This is all that is necessary to create a secure offsite backup.

Other backup targets

To use another backup target then the local path /opt/restic/local you have to provide the additional environment variable RESTIC_REPOSITORY. Some backends require additional environment variables for authentication.

Here are some examples. For more details, refer to the official restic documentation.

RESTIC_REPOSITORY='rest:https://user:pass@host/'

RESTIC_REPOSITORY='s3:s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name'
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='...'
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='...'

RESTIC_REPOSITORY='s3:s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name'
B2_ACCOUNT_ID='...'
B2_ACCOUNT_KEY='...'

rclone is already installed in the backup container and expects the configuration file at /root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf. Generate your rclone.conf at the host and mount it to the container at this location. Then you can use restic with rclone as described in the manual.

volumes:
    ...
    - /opt/restic/rclone.conf:/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf:ro

RESTIC_REPOSITORY='rclone:xxx:yyy'

Start the backup

Now it is time to load the container and start the backup for the first time.

cd /opt/seafile-compose && \
docker compose up -d

Afterwards check the logs for more details.

docker logs restic-backup

The output might look like this:

[2024-05-17 16:16] Starting the restic backup container ...
[2024-05-17 16:16] Restic repository '/local' does not exists.
  Running restic init.
  created restic repository 7982e3a700 at /local

Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository
Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.
[2024-05-17 16:16] Setup backup cron job with cron expr. BACKUP_CRON: 20 2 * * *
[2024-05-17 16:16] Setup check cron job with cron expr. CHECK_CRON: 40 3 * * 6
[2024-05-17 16:16] Container started successful.
  The restic repository is initialized, cron daemon runs...
  Ready for backup!

Perfect! Your backup was initialized and will run every day at 2.20am.

More information about the usage of the restic backup container can be found at the github repository restic-backup-docker.