Make a Backup

Run a backup

Back up all configured sources to all configured repositories:

vykar backup

By default, Vykar preserves filesystem extended attributes (xattrs). Configure this globally with xattrs.enabled, and override per source in rich sources entries.

If some files are unreadable or disappear during the run (for example, permission denied or a file vanishes), Vykar skips those files, still creates the snapshot from everything else, and returns exit code 3 to indicate partial success.

Sources and labels

In its simplest form, sources are just a list of paths:

sources:
  - /home/user/documents
  - /home/user/photos

For more complex situations you can add overrides to source groups. Each “rich” source in your config produces its own snapshot. When you use the rich source form, the label field gives each source a short name you can reference from the CLI:

sources:
  - path: "/home/user/photos"
    label: "photos"
  - paths:
      - "/home/user/documents"
      - "/home/user/notes"
    label: "docs"
    exclude: ["*.tmp"]
    hooks:
      before: "echo starting docs backup"

Back up only a specific source by label:

vykar backup --source docs

When targeting a specific repository, use --repo:

vykar backup --repo local --source docs

Ad-hoc backups

You can still do ad-hoc backups of arbitrary folders and annotate them with a label, for example before a system change:

vykar backup --label before-upgrade /var/www

--label is only valid for ad-hoc backups with explicit path arguments. For example, this is rejected:

vykar backup --label before-upgrade

So you can identify it later in vykar list output.

List and verify snapshots

# List all snapshots
vykar list

# List the 5 most recent snapshots
vykar list --last 5

# List snapshots for a specific source
vykar list --source docs

# List files inside a snapshot
vykar snapshot list a1b2c3d4

# Find recent SQL dumps across recent snapshots
vykar snapshot find --last 5 --name '*.sql'

# Find logs from one source changed in the last week
vykar snapshot find --source myapp --since 7d --iname '*.log'

Command dumps

You can capture the stdout of shell commands directly into your backup using command_dumps. This is useful for database dumps, API exports, or any generated data that doesn’t live as a regular file on disk:

sources:
  - path: /var/www/myapp
    label: myapp
    command_dumps:
      - name: postgres.sql
        command: pg_dump -U myuser mydb
      - name: redis.rdb
        command: redis-cli --rdb -

Each command runs via sh -c and the captured output is stored as a virtual file under .vykar-dumps/ in the snapshot. On restore, these appear as regular files:

.vykar-dumps/postgres.sql
.vykar-dumps/redis.rdb

You can also create dump-only sources with no filesystem paths:

sources:
  - label: databases
    command_dumps:
      - name: all-databases.sql
        command: pg_dumpall -U postgres

Dump-only sources require an explicit label. If any command exits with a non-zero status, the backup is aborted.

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