A dead-simple solution to backup all volumes of a container and to restore them. It is based on borg.

It assumes that all the backups of a given host will reside in a local directory ready to be rsync'd somewhere else (like S3 or GCS.)

Archives always have names like bs_yyyy-mm@HH.MM.SS, and the automatic prune command only applies on names starting with bs_ to allow for durable custom backups.

While volume drivers certainly seem nice, I wanted a simpler and less involved solution to back up my containers. I also happen to like the relative simplicity and encapsulation of having volumes that I don't have to explicitely bind to have my applications working.

Which is why I wanted a tool that would allow me to type myutil backup my-container to have it backed up somewhere and myutil restore my-container from-my-backup to have all of its volumes completely restored to what I backuped earlier.

Being able to have multiple save points back in time and easily restore to whichever I chose was a big plus, which borg filled with relative grace.

You will need the basement docker image :

docker pull ceymard/basement

To run basement, it is recommanded to create a small script in /usr/local/bin. An example is provided in the example folder. The script must bind /var/run/docker.sock and /repositories to respectively the docker socket and a directory where the repositories will be stored.

From this point on, it will be assumed that such a script is installed on your system as basement.

basement backup <container-name> [--prefix <some_prefix>] [--passphrase <a passphrase>]

basement list <container-name>

basement restore <container-name> <archive-name>

A script is provided in example/ that does some docker ps voodoo to get a list of containers having the basement.auto-backup label and backuping them all. This is what I use with a cron on the host to backup all the important containers.

By default when backuping or restoring a running container, basement will shut it down, along with any container using the same mount points as RW. To prevent such behaviour, use the --no-stop flag on the command line.

This behaviour exists for safely backuping databases which usually require to be stopped to avoid data loss because of data not commited to the disk yet.

By default, a repository name is inferred from the container's name to which its id is appended (this is to avoid mixing up containers inadvertently.)

To specify another name, pass --backup-name <the name> on the command line to any command. This can also be used to restore another container from any backup.

You can also specify the name in the basement.backup-name label.

By default, basement creates archives with the name bs_<timestamp>. All of the prune operations use this prefix to avoid messing up with custom archive names or custom prefixes you may use.

You can always override the prefix by passing --prefix <my_prefix> to any command, or setting basement.prefix=... in a container label.

There are three ways you can prune unneeded archives ;

# By passing arguments that borg prune accept in a string
basement prune <container> '-d 3 -w 4'

# By passing the prune arguments to backup
basement backup <container> --prune '-d 3 -w 4'

# Or by settings the label 'basement.auto-prune=<prune options>'
basement backup <container> # Backup will then apply the auto prune

--prefix affects all of these commands. Remember that by default, --prefix is set to "bs".

Basement can currently only use passphrases, which you can set with --passphrase on any operation, or through the basement.passphrase label.

Basement supports the following labels :

• basement.backup-name as the repository name
• basement.prefix as the default prefix for this container
• basement.auto-prune as the prune options to apply everytime backup is called
• basement.passphrase as the passphrase to give to the backups