Using a third party tool to drive tarsnap backups

I have used Tarsnap since at least 2017. The jobs ran nightly.

It wasn’t until three years later, that I started cleaning up old backups.

Now I’ve found a tool which manages this for me (sysutils/acts) courtesy of a toot by M W Lucas.

The selling point of this tool:

By default, 31 daily, 12 monthly, and indefinite yearly backups are kept.

Sounds good enough for me. I’ll buy that.

The install and configuration

After installing it, I created this cronjob:

[15:33 svn dan /usr/local/etc/cron.d] % cat acts 
19    5       *       *       *       root    /usr/local/bin/acts

The only configuration change I made was to specify the one directory I wanted to backup:

[15:34 svn dan /usr/local/etc] % diff -ruN acts.conf.sample acts.conf
--- acts.conf.sample	2024-01-22 17:55:54.000000000 +0000
+++ acts.conf	2024-01-22 20:33:58.171941000 +0000
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 # backuptargets
 # Space-separated list of directories to backup, relative to /. This is a required option.
 # Default: unset
-#backuptargets="var etc root usr/home"
+backuptargets="usr/local/svn/repos"
 
 # tarsnap
 # What command to call for 'tarsnap'.

The email

Eventually, I received an email:

Checking via the command line, I could see the jobs had run:

# tarsnap --list-archives -vv > ~/tarsnap-svn-archive-list

In that file I found:

The misunderstanding

This was after I’d mistakenly thought the job had not run at all.

The delete

Next, it was time to delete the old backups I did not want. I show how how to do that in the aforementioned My first big Tarsnap backup.

The whole purpose of this blog post is not to help you, but to help me. I am leaving this here for your analysis and my future reference. However, I doubt I’ll every refer to this data again.