Local backup of remote server

Support
1

Hi All,

I’m in need of a bit of help.

I’m trying to set up a backup flow for my VPS, and my approach was:

  1. I run a backup of e.g. /etc and other folders to /opt/backup – now I have to do this as root, because only root can access the backed up files
  2. and I would like to pull sync the repository to my home PC – I though I can do this with:
    1. connecting to it (via kopia connect sftp) as my regular user on the VPS
    2. and after that sync it to a filesystem repo on my home PC

Now 2.1 already has two issues:

  1. kopia cannot use my ssh-agent, can’t prompt for a password and I hate having a passwordless ssh-key file – but I created one
  2. my regular user cannot read 700/600 folders and files in the repo.

This all makes me feel I’m not using the right approach. I know I could push the sync out home – but that requires a lot of set-up, port fwds, some dns solution etc – again, probably not the right approach.

What would be the kopia way of doing this?

Appreciate any help!

Szabolcs

2

Kopia can only backup local files and directories. So if you want to pull data from a remote system you have to mount it locally.

3

You could mount the root directory of the remote server with sshfs:

mount -t sshfs server:/ /tmp/mountpoint

And the do the backup from /tmp/mountpoint

This is how I do it and it works very well.