🗂️ How to make per-application backups

You may find yourself wanting to create different backup policies for different applications on your system or even for different backup repositories. For instance, you might want one backup configuration for your database data directory and a different configuration for your user home directories. Or one backup configuration for your local backups with a different configuration for your remote repository.

The way to accomplish that is pretty simple: Create multiple separate configuration files and place each one in a /etc/borgmatic.d/ directory. For instance, for applications:

sudo mkdir /etc/borgmatic.d
sudo borgmatic config generate --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/app1.yaml
sudo borgmatic config generate --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/app2.yaml

Or, for repositories:

sudo mkdir /etc/borgmatic.d
sudo borgmatic config generate --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/repo1.yaml
sudo borgmatic config generate --destination /etc/borgmatic.d/repo2.yaml

Prior to version 1.7.15 The command to generate configuration files was generate-borgmatic-config instead of borgmatic config generate.

When you set up multiple configuration files like this, borgmatic will run each one in turn from a single borgmatic invocation. This includes, by default, the traditional /etc/borgmatic/config.yaml as well.

Each configuration file is interpreted independently, as if you ran borgmatic for each configuration file one at a time. In other words, borgmatic does not perform any merging of configuration files by default. If you'd like borgmatic to merge your configuration files, for instance to avoid duplication of settings, see below about configuration includes.

Additionally, the ~/.config/borgmatic.d/ directory works the same way as /etc/borgmatic.d.

If you need even more customizability, you can specify alternate configuration paths on the command-line with borgmatic's --config flag. (See the command-line documentation for more information.) For instance, if you want to schedule your various borgmatic backups to run at different times, you'll need multiple entries in your scheduling software of choice, each entry using borgmatic's --config flag instead of relying on /etc/borgmatic.d.

Limitations

borgmatic does not currently support its own parallelism—being run multiple times on the same machine simultaneously. In particular, many of the data source hooks rely on global borgmatic runtime files which can't be shared across processes, and therefore multiple borgmatic instances on the same machine would interfere with each other.

A single borgmatic instance also doesn't currently support running multiple Borg instances in parallel on the same machine.

Related features

Once you've got multiple configuration files, there are a few other borgmatic features that you might find handy:

• Use different archive naming schemes in each configuration file with the archive name format feature.
• Share common options across configuration files with includes.
• Override configuration file options from the command-line with overrides.
• Also check out the constants feature for defining custom per-configuration-file constants.