Configuration

Let’s see how to configure Wrestic.
Wrestic’s configuration is pretty simple. All you have to do is generate a wrestic.toml file and add profiles.

Configuring wrestic.toml

Inside of your $USER folder, you have to create (if is not created yet) a .config folder.
Your Wrestic configuration will live there inside another folder called wrestic.

So the path will be: /home/<$USER>/.config/wrestic/wrestic.toml

you can make that path available with the following command:

mkdir -p ~/.config/wrestic && touch ~/.config/wrestic/wrestic.toml

Now that you have created your wrestic.toml file, let’s deep dive into the configuration.

Add a profile

Profiles are basically an object with the information needed to create, restore, backup, etc… your repository.

If you have more than 1 profile in your wrestic.toml you’ll be asked for the profile you want to use when performing an action.

To add a profile to your wrestic.toml file look at the following example:

[settings.local]
BACKEND = "local"
RESTIC_PASSWORD = "alexsupersecretpassword"
REPOSITORY = "/home/alex/Documents/demo-repo"
BACKUP_FOLDER = "/home/alex/Documents/demo"
RESTORE_FOLDER = "/home/alex/Documents/restored"
KEEP_LAST = 10

• PROFILE: In the example you can see that the profile name local is preceded by settings.. You can set the profile name that you like, it could be something like [settings.blazingly_fast] or [settings.pineapple], but profiles need to be unique.
  When creating a new profile, don’t forget to add settings. before the profile name.

• BACKEND: So, you have to pick a backend.
  If you are going to perform a backup locally: BACKEND = "local"
  If you are going to perform a backup remotely, you have a big list of backends, in fact, they are the same backends that Restic supports, like:

  • AWS S3: BACKEND = "s3"
  • AZURE: BACKEND = "azure"
  • BACKBLAZE B2: BACKEND = "b2"
  • GOOGLE CLOUD STORAGE: BACKEND = "gs"
  • MINIO: BACKEND = "s3"
  • WASABI: BACKEND = "s3"
  • SFTP: BACKEND = "sftp"

• RESTIC_PASSWORD: Here is where we set the repository password for Restic.
  When creating a repository, we are asked to input a password for it so data gets encrypted and this password is the key. With Wrestic you can create the repository on the fly by entering the command wrestic init, but we’ll get into that later. The thing is…

  • If your repo is not created yet: RESTIC_PASSWORD = "your_new_password"
  • If repo already exists: RESTIC_PASSWORD = "your_good_old_password"

  And don’t worry, Wrestic is very clever, so when you run wrestic init, it only initialize the new repos (not initialized yet) that founds in your wrestic.toml.

• REPOSITORY & BACKUP_FOLDER/RESTORE_FOLDER: In REPOSITORY is where you give Wrestic the path you your repository. It can exists or not yet.
  Let’s say you want to backup your ~/Documents folder into ~/BACKUPS/my_documents_backup:

  • REPOSITORY = "/home/alex/BACKUPS/my_documents_backup"
  • BACKUP_FOLDER = "/home/alex/Documents"

  So, What if someday I want to recover my ~/Documents folder into ~/RESTORED/my_recovered_documents_folder:

  • RESTORE_FOLDER = "/home/alex/RESTORED/my_recovered_documents_folder"

• KEEP_LAST: Number of backups you want to keep.

  Easy, right? 😁