How to work with mulitple repos at the same time?

General Topics
1

How to work with multiple repositories at the same time from the CLI? That seems like a valid use case, e.g. backing everything up over night. I was confused when I had two terminal instances running kopia and instance and interacting with another switched the other instance to it.

  • Is --config-file=<repo>.config enough? I don’t see a way to generate the config file for a repo to a particular name. When adding repos, it seems awkward to 1) check there is no “global/default?” repository.config or rename it first, 2) connect to the repo to generate the appropriate repository.config, 3) rename it manually, then 4) --use-confile='new-repo.config.

  • What about the cache–does kopia handle this itself automatically for each repo or should you work out a way to dedicate different cache locations to each repo? Any other types of data or consideration that should be considered to fully make working with each repo an isolated/complete instance so that backing up and working with multiple repositories at the same time works well?

I’m trying to get a better picture of this to try to work out a wrapper script to handle this nicely.

2

Yes, --config-file is enough. You can add this parameter for most of Kopia’s CLI commands, even for the initial creation of the repository.

kopia --config-file=/home/user/.config/kopia-repo1 repo create filesystem --path=/home/user/kopia-repo1

If you don’t want to add the --config-file parameter to all of your commands you can instead use the corresponding environment variable (see --help).

export KOPIA_CONFIG_PATH=/home/user/.config/kopia-repo1

Use kopia repo status to print information about your repository configuration including the path to the configuration file that is in use.

Kopia uses a dedicated cache directory per repository. On Unix systems this defaults to ~/.cache/kopia/REPO_HASH. Use kopia cache info to print information about the cache.

/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/blob-list: 4 files 333 B (duration: 30s)
/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/contents: 1 files 41 B (soft limit: 5.2 GB, hard limit: none, min sweep age: 10m0s)
/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/index-blobs: 1 files 41 B
/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/indexes: 1 files 115 B
/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/metadata: 1 files 41 B (soft limit: 5.2 GB, hard limit: none, min sweep age: 24h0m0s)
/home/user/.cache/kopia/8654832691c41839/own-writes: 1 files 40 B
To adjust cache sizes use 'kopia cache set'.
To clear caches use 'kopia cache clear'.