My Wishlist (was: Reporting Newbie difficulties)

[jscheidtmann]

Hi,

Awesome tool! Keep up the good work!

I'd like to let you know, which difficulties I perceived as an experienced IT person, but as a newbie with resticprofile. So what follows is my personal wish list for resticprofile

Chaining backup steps

What confused me as a newbie was that I there's no one solution how one can chain different parts of the backup process:

• There are check-afterand check-before options for the backup-section.
• retention has after-backup and before-backup items,
• but there are no retention-after or retention-before items in backup
• check doesn't have these, see backup above.
• retention is a separate section and you have to use prune: true in it, but in the prune section, there are no after-retention or before-retention or similar items. I wondered, if the profile's prune section applies at all?

I very much like the approach GitHub takes with actions: You define each job step and declare the steps it depends on in a depends- item. I would very much like to have this mechanism available in resticprofile. This - for sure - has to be thought through more thoroughly and certainly is also an upgrade problem (maybe it can be included in v2 of the profile, still?)

Even more awesome would be, if you had a good and intuitive solution for how to run only one or two steps (or a subset) from the command line.

Credential Management

One of the bigger hassles with every backup program is managing credentials (for AWS, Azure, the repo encryption key, etc).
Unfortunately this is already a mess in restic: Depending on the backend, you may have to set certain environment variables. As you're already intimately mated with restic, why expose these pitfalls to the users? You could add syntactic sugar to make this easier!

What confuses me as an IT professional, is that there's not a single page on passwords and how to manage these gracefully in the documentation. You mention password-file in the examples and introduction, but then the topic is not touched again, it seems.

I am very much opinionated, that a password should not be stored on disc unencrypted. Passwords belong into a credential manager or into a keychain. And at best it is forgotten, the time you've used it. Unfortunately restic doesn't take care of this as a backup solution.

At least I wish you had a section in the manual that explained how to use password-command with the keychain of respective operating systems.

How to implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy

What made resticprofile interesting for me was, that one can have a single configuration file, defining all the backup and repo configurations in a single file. Using inheritance, it seems to be easy to implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy, or a 4-3-2, or any other strategy and have a single command to execute any of these configs.

I'll be happy to share a "how to implement a 3-2-1 config" once I have developed it!

[creativeprojects]

Thank you for all these very valid comments.

To give a bit of history I only started this script for my own needs. It turned out that a lot of different features were added over time, ending up with a product not really well rounded.

Even the documentation was an after-thought 😄

As this is a backup script I can't really go back to it and change how things work in the configuration without breaking anything for anyone.

The plan right now is to get a version 1 out and then I'll start cleaning things up 👍🏻

I'll be happy to share a "how to implement a 3-2-1 config" once I have developed it!

Please do, we're working on improving the documentation

[jscheidtmann]

Hi, I will be AFK for the next 5-6 weeks. Will get to it afterwards.