DEV Community: Helder Rossa

rust api

Helder Rossa — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:35:38 +0000

How easy and securely is to backup your computer?

Helder Rossa — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 12:09:19 +0000

We all know that we should always back up our stuff and that there's lots of things that can go wrong if we don't:

Hard drives could fail or loss data
Files of folders can accidentally be deleted, become corrupt, or maybe accidentally over wrote a newer one
Viruses can corrupt or delete files
You may upgrade to a new computer and need to move your files.

For what ever reason, and depending on the importance of that information, you could be in a seriously problem or loose hours of work.

Restic is the backup software that I'm using to backup my files. Its Open Source, with strong encryption, versioning, and only transfers what you need to, so you don't use up more space than you need to. Works on Linux, Mac, BSD, and Windows, however if you want to use Restic, you still need to know your way around a shell.

This is one of the tools that I use to restore my computer from scratch.

Restic Setup

Let's create the restic configuration folders (you can create on any other path, this is just my preference):

mkdir -p ~/.restic/backups

And create the ~/.restic/cron.sh script to perform the backups:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
RESTIC_ROOT="$( cd "$(dirname "$0")" ; pwd -P )"

for BACKUP_ROOT in $RESTIC_ROOT/backups/* ; do
    source "$BACKUP_ROOT/env"

    BACKUP_DIR=$(cat "$BACKUP_ROOT/path")

    restic backup $BACKUP_DIR -q --exclude-file="$BACKUP_ROOT/excludes" --exclude-caches

    restic forget -q --keep-last 2 --prune
done

This script will go throw all backup configurations and perform the backup and forget restic commands for each of them.

Note that I'm keeping the last two backups, but there's a lot of options in restic. You can choose to keep weekly, monthly or yearly backups. Just go to their documentation about keep policy.

Backup configuration

So, let's create our first backup configuration. In this case, I'll backup stuff from my user home folder.

Instead of resting prompting for the password, and manually creating one, I prefer to generate a random password. And so, using openssl to generate a bunch or random characters:

openssl rand -hex 64 > ~/.restic/backups/home/password

Remembering your password is important! If you lose it, you won’t be able to access data stored in the repository because all data it's encrypted.

After that, store my home folder path:

echo $HOME > ~/.restic/backups/home/path

Set environment configurations for this backup. I'm using B2 Cloud Storage for this. It's free for the first 10 GB. You can use any of the restic supported repositories:

cat > ~/.restic/backups/home/env << EOL
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=b2:bucket-name:path-to-store
export B2_ACCOUNT_ID=<your account id here>
export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY=<your account key here>
export RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE=~/.restic/backups/home/password
EOL

Create the excludes file. In reality this is where I say restic what to backup in every line starting with the ! sign:

cat > ~/.restic/backups/home/excludes << EOL
# excluding any directory, then selectively add back some of them
/Users/kimus/*
!/Users/kimus/Documents
!/Users/kimus/Develop
/Users/kimus/Develop/**/*.gz

# dotfiles
!/Users/kimus/.local/share/chezmoi
!/Users/kimus/.gitconfig
!/Users/kimus/.restic
!/Users/kimus/.ssh
!/Users/kimus/.zshrc
!/Users/kimus/.zprofile
!/Users/kimus/.kube
/Users/kimus/.kube/cache

# global ignores
node_modules
.next/cache
.DS_Store
EOL

Please note that this is my initial configuration, and yours could be different. You should take some time to make sure your are backing up all information that you need and excluding files that you don't. Doing so, the backup will be optimised in size and that will provide faster backup times and less payments in your cloud provider.

In the end will get something like this:

.restic
├── backups
│   └── home
│       ├── env
│       ├── excludes
│       ├── password
│       └── path
└── cron.sh

In my case I'm trying to backup only the essencial files, like the dotfiles, source code, documents, etc. All files or folders not needed I will exclude them. And so, to test the configuration, and check all the files this configuration will backup you can use the following:

source ~/.restic/backups/user/env
restic backup $HOME --exclude-file="$HOME/.restic/backups/home/excludes" --dry-run -vv

check for files bigger then a size:
du -ch -t 1M Develop | grep -v node_modules

Manually execute the cron.sh and you will get your first backup. To check, you can execute the snapshots command. You will need the source the env file if not done yet.

source ~/.restic/backups/user/env
$ restic snapshots
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)
ID        Time                 Host                   Tags        Paths
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e4183d6f  2023-03-10 12:00:00  Helders-MacBook-Pro14              /Users/kimus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 snapshot

And to check the size of the snapshot, and other ifnormation you could use the stats command. I use this to check and control the size of the backup information:

❯ restic stats latest
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)
scanning...
Stats in restore-size mode:
     Snapshots processed:  1
        Total File Count:  8097
              Total Size:  758.753 MiB

Schedule Backups

If you wonder how often you should back up your data, just ask yourself, "How many days work can I afford to lose"? Whenever you make changes to files, or add new files, you need to back up your files again. It is a good practice to back up your files on a daily basis. If you are working on a critical project, you may want to back it up even more often.

For simplicity I'm using crontab to do scheduled backups every day at 12h.

0 12 * * * source $HOME/.zprofile; /Users/kimus/.restic/cron.sh

I'm including my ~/.zprofile because I use zsh and it's where I'm loading my homebrew configuration. Depending on your enviorment configuration you can just put the cron.sh here.

Restoring from backup

Restoring a snapshot is as easy as it sounds, just use the following command to restore the contents of the latest snapshot to /tmp/restore-work:

$ restic restore latest  --target /tmp/restore-work
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)
restoring <Snapshot 5eb3c41e of [/Users/kimus] at 2023-03-10 13:54:00.623059 +0000 UTC by kimus@Helders-MacBook-Pro14> to /tmp/restore-work

You can use --target=/ to restore the backup to the original path.

Just look at the files:

open /tmp/restore-work

To toggle hidden files in the macOS Finder you can to use Shift+Command+. shortcut.

Find, Dump or Restore single files

Let's say we want to find the a file cron.sh from the list of backup snapshots:

$ restic find cron.sh
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)
Found matching entries in snapshot 3241c91f from 2023-03-12 12:00:00
/Users/kimus/.restic/cron.sh

Found matching entries in snapshot 5eb3c41e from 2023-03-10 13:54:00
/Users/kimus/.restic/cron.sh

Now we can check the contents of the file by using:

$ restic dump -q 5eb3c41e /Users/kimus/.restic/cron.sh
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
RESTIC_ROOT="$( cd "$(dirname "$0")" ; pwd -P )"
   (...)
done

To restore the file we could do:

restic restore latest --path=/Users/kimus --include=/Users/kimus/.restic/cron.sh --target=/tmp/restore-work

Again, you can use --target=/ to restore the file to the original path.

Backup Databases

Regarding database (or any other) dump files we could use the power of restic to backup, versioning and restoring this files. Restic is capable of reading data from stdin, which can be used for saving the output of your database dump program.

Example of using mongodump (equivalent to mysqldump) to backup the dump file to the repository:

mongodump -d database --collection=Events --quiet --gzip --archive | restic backup --stdin --stdin-filename database-events.tgz
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)

Files:           1 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Dirs:            0 new,     0 changed,     0 unmodified
Added to the repository: 291 B (262 B stored)

processed 1 files, 610 B in 0:07
snapshot 529265dd saved

The backup snapshot can now be checked:

restic snapshots --path /database-events.tgz
repository b4fadbba opened (version 2, compression level auto)
ID        Time                 Host                   Tags        Paths
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ad104c68  2023-03-12 15:02:47  Helders-MacBook-Pro14              /database-events.tgz
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 snapshots

When needed, we could also easily restore it:

restic dump latest database-events.tgz | mongorestore --gzip --archive --drop

My macOS from Scratch for Development

Helder Rossa — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:43:04 +0000

Lately I needed to change computer. I've been thinking about backing up only my relevant files, like documents, images app settings, dotfiles, etc, instead of backing up the full OS. And when I wanted to install my macOS from scratch I would only need to execute a script to restore those files and quickly having a working computer in a couple of minutes.

Be advice that this is a working progress and I'm open for comments to improve this scripts.

Start from Scratch

Although not needed to execute the script, you may want to start from scratch (clean your current disk), and if you didn't both a new computer, your only option is to reinstall your macOS. You can read the official apple guide on how to do it.

But in short:

Restart machine and press Cmd+R to go into recovery mode
Open Disk Utility to wipe out disk entirely (this should be an option of the initial setup)
Quit Disk Utility, go back to setup and use the option to reinstall OS

Now that you have a clean disk you can go through all the steps of installing your macOS, creating the user account, etc.

The Magic Steps

When you gain access to the desktop, you could now follow the next steps that will installs and configure most of the software I use on my personal macOS using Homebrew and Chezmoi.

1. Install Homebrew

You need to start from somewhere right? So, let's ensure Homebrew installed using skip tap clonning option:

export HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API=1
export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

This also will install Command Line Tools for Xcode, and all the tools for the next steps.

2. Clone the repository to your local drive

Of course I will use my own repository, but you could clone it and customise it.

git clone https://github.com/kimus/macos-from-scratch
cd macos-from-scratch

3. Run bootstrap.sh script

From here it's expected to be all automatically.

./bootstrap.sh

By default it uses your current user name (environment variable USER) to get your dotfiles from GitHub. You can use my own like this:

GITHUB_USERNAME=kimus ./bootstrap.sh

The script will ask you for your Bitwarden account. This is where I store my secrets (i.e. SSH keys).

In the future I'm planning to restore my working folder and other files (pictures, documents, etc) from a backup made with restic. I have a separated post about restic backups.

And that's it, at this time you should have a working macOS with your favourite applications and settings.

Here is how my terminal looks like:

Defaults

This script will setup a bunch of tools, applications and configurations.

Tools and Applications

Applications (installed with Homebrew Cask):

Check Brewfile for the full list of tools and applications.

Visual Studio Code Extensions

Check vscodefile for the full list of Visual Studio Code extensions.

MacOS System Preferences

There are a few other preferences and settings added on for various apps and services. Check osxfile for a list of macos specific system preferences.

dotfiles

Finally, the dotfiles are also installed by Chezmoi into the current user's home directory. This step needs the Bitwarden account to restore the SSH keys.