Ever wanted to create a backup of your databases¹ per branch and track each record in an easily searchable text file?

Metabox is a backup and restore tool that can:

1. Save backups in multiple silos: remote, local, s3, etc
2. Record every unique backups in a VCS-friendly txt file.

Metabox is a re-implementation of a shell script of the same name archived in nmcapule/metabox and is also inspired by huacnlee/gobackup.

You need go toolchain installed.

$ go get -u github.com/nmcapule/metabox-go

If $GOBIN is in your $PATH, you can test it with:

$ metabox-go --help

At its core, metabox is just a backup/restore tool. To set it up, you will need a yaml file describing which files to backup and how will it be stored.

For example:

target:
    prefix_path: ./target
    includes:
        - "**/*"
    excludes:
        - ".git/"
        - "examples/"

See the examples folder for more usage examples.

When executed with metabox backup, it will:

1. Archive all contents of the target folder into a <hash>.tar.gz, where hash is the sha256 hash of all the included files in the folder.
2. Put the generated .tar.gz in workspace folder called ./cache.
3. Create an entry for this particular backup in a backups.txt file. One line in this file corresponds to exactly one backup.

The first step is important since it determines if this particular set of target files has been backed up before. If yes, then metabox will skip step #2 and #3.

When backing up/restoring files, metabox will look first in the backups.txt file usually in the same folder as the metabox yaml file.

This file tracks all the made backups to check if a backup for this set of files already exists. The backups.txt file is also important for quickly searching backups via tags -- which can be attached while doing a metabox backup command.

Each line in the backups.txt file corresponds to exactly one backup. This convention makes it very easy to embed to distributed VCS with all the merging and parallel workflows going on.

Here is an example of a backup file:

824f4cb43a55bef5611b555dd305126f 1598781213 anonymous branch:development,database:default
76fcbf4753af490f4ba8f52758ddb107 1597515810 anonymous -
98838a715cc75d24359a7632b26627dc 1598786787 anonymous hello,world

Each column corresponds to:

• Files/Folders hash
• Created timestamp
• Creator
• Tags

You can checkout config/config.go for a possibly full list.

Make sure metabox-go is reachable in your $PATH env.

$ metabox-go backup ./examples/ouroboros/ouroboros.metabox.yml

$ metabox-go backup ./examples/ouroboros/ouroboros.metabox.yml -t hello -t branch:development

$ metabox-go restore ./examples/ouroboros/ouroboros.metabox.yml

$ metabox-go restore ./examples/ouroboros/ouroboros.metabox.yml -t hello -t branch:development

None, it's too early and still shitty. Maybe a checklist if things to do first:

• Config option to store backups to another local path
• Config option to store backups to a remote computer
• Config option to store backups to Amazon S3
• Use cache. No longer compress / download if it's already in the cache
• Multiple values for backup config option
• Merge / restore strategies: merge, nuke, existing_only, nonexisting_only
• Fix cli to use spf13/cobra for sane invocations
• Allow restore command by specifying hash
• Automated unit tests

I wanted to mess around with bazel.