Backup where sources are a mix of local FS and external drives

[fvsch]

Just started using rustic for personal backups, and finishing my first backup over SFTP.

One worry I have is that I'm trying to back up files from two drives:

• My laptop's main drive, which is always mounted
• An external SSD drive, which may or may not be mounted at any given time

I've created a config file with [[backup.snapshots]] entries both for always-mounted folders and for sometimes-mounted folder, which looks like this:

[repository]
repository = "opendal:sftp"
# options = { ... }

[backup]
skip-if-unchanged = true

[[backup.snapshots]]
sources = [
  "/Users/me/.config",
  "/Users/me/Documents",
  "/Users/me/Downloads",
  "/Users/me/Pictures"
]

[[backup.snapshots]]
sources = [
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Movies",
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Music",
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Photos"
]

Ideally, I'd like to be able to to backup local files even when my secondary drive is not mounted (i.e. /Volumes/MyDrive does not exist at all), without messing up my backup(s).

A quick test with a local repository shows that I might get some errors when running rustic backup, such as:

[ERROR] error backing up /Volumes/MyDrive/Movies,/Volumes/MyDrive/Music,/Volumes/MyDrive/Photos: error sanitizing source=s"PathList(["/Volumes/MyDrive/Movies", "/Volumes/MyDrive/Music", "/Volumes/MyDrive/Photos"])"
...
error: Not all snapshots were generated successfully!

But paths which are present are backed up correctly. So it looks like this works fine, as long as the paths are fully missing (rather than resolving to empty directories). It's just maybe a bit distracting to have to parse the error(s) and check if the issue is just "yeah sure, i haven't mounted that drive, i'm okay with that" or if something else went wrong.

Anyone has experience with a similar setup? Anything I could do better?

[fvsch]

I guess one option would be to create two profiles that both push to the same repository.

# ~/.config/rustic/sftp-repo.yml

[repository]
repository = "opendal:sftp"
# options = { ... }

[backup]
skip-if-unchanged = true

# ~/.config/rustic/local-files.yml

[global]
use-profiles = ["sftp-repo"]

[[backup.snapshots]]
sources = [
  "/Users/me/.config",
  "/Users/me/Documents",
  "/Users/me/Downloads",
  "/Users/me/Pictures"
]

# ~/.config/rustic/my-drive.yml

[global]
use-profiles = ["sftp-repo"]

[[backup.snapshots]]
sources = [
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Movies",
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Music",
  "/Volumes/MyDrive/Photos"
]

And then I can do rustic -P local-files or rustic -P my-drive.

[fvsch]

Looks like re-running rustic backup while my external SSD drive is not plugged in does print a “Not all snapshots were generated successfully!” error, but does not create empty or corrupted snapshots. Running rustic check shows no issues.

I think that'll be good enough for my use case. If anyone knows a different method, feel free to chime in.