How do policies work exactly when it comes to scheduling

Support
1

Hi there,

I am new to kopia and so far, I like it.

But there is one thing I don’t understand: How the hell do policies work? And even more: How do intervals work?

And what does this even mean? Well, I saw the help:

      --snapshot-interval=SNAPSHOT-INTERVAL ...  
                                 Interval between snapshots

But what does that mean? Will kopia create a systemd timer or cronjob for me? A daemon is not running on my Ubuntu server, as far as I can tell.

And where is all that saved? If I do

kopia --config-file /root/.config/kopia/local.config policy set --global --snapshot-interval 1h

nothing is saved in the local.config.

My goal is to automate that process for some of my servers and I am still not sure, whether I should ansible run a few cli commands or whether I should create a config using a template.

2

Any scheduling related policies only apply when you use kopia GUI app. Otherwise they do nothing.

There is no CLI scheduler for any OS.

3

Hi there,

thank you very much for your response. That is helpful.

I got a few more questions, if you don’t mind:

  • Are there other CLI commands that don’t work without kopia UI?
  • What would you advice me to choose: Automate kopia using CLI-commands or building configs based on templates?

Thanks a lot :slight_smile:

4

All CLI commands work without UI… UI is just a fancy wrapper + scheduler.

Depends:) If you do not mind running UI all the time then do not bother with CLI.

Myself I prefer CLI and my own scheduler (systemd). It runs kopia snapshot create --all and kopia maintenance run --full on my preferred schedule.

Please note that you can use both CLI and UI at the same time. When I want to restore some file I start UI - much faster and easier than CLI syntax:)

For starting with kopia I would recommend UI first and then if needed/wanted starting with CLI.

5

All policies are stored inside the repository.

I’d personally go with CLI commands because it feels saver than messing around with undocumented repository.config and repository.config.kopia-password files.

But beware that Kopia overrides the configuration file when running kopia repo connect on a already connected repository. You might want to create a check for that in your playbook.