Paperless cloud backups
https://samsm.ch/paperless-cloud-backups/
Some documentation on how I setup backing up my paperless-ngx documents to dropbox using rclone and some custom code
I wouldn’t trust Dropbox, ever. I backup to Proton, but use Cryptomator to encrypt everything first.
@darntootin I don’t see how Proton is all that more trustworthy, but encryption is a good idea, and my method works fine for both since rclone already supports proton (https://rclone.org/protondrive/) and encrypting your data pre-copy (https://rclone.org/crypt/)
This was enough for me to never use them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropbox-spooks-users-by-sending-data-to-openai-for-ai-search-features/
If you encrypt at home it doesn’t matter where you do offsite. See Cryptomator for an easy platform agnostic approach. Why trust the bastards?
Ah, should have updooted darntootin, oh well. Still, OP, a bit more detail (like I encrypt with rclone, would have been nice.) Cool. Got my own system, but anything that helps…
Restic is a good backup tool with encryption. Cryptomator is awesome but it doesn’t do backups, just storage.
Completely correct. It’s a useful tool for people protecting their precious memories, not an ongoing protection of an OS state.
@MalReynolds Rclone can encrypt, but I also like to have another avenue to access my documents in case for some reason I can’t accessy homelab.
Cryptomator has an android app, haven’t used it in anger (It’s not a backup until you restore successfully), but it’s there.
I use restic to backup my paperless documents to a Hetzner Storage Box. The setup was easy and I am independent of US cloud hosters.
@lokalhorst As I mentioned in the post, this method can be used to back up to many different providers (incl. hetzner, see https://rclone.org/docs/). I assume w/ restic you’re just backing up the folder where paperless stores the docs rather than the export. IMO the latter is nice because leaves you w/ something that’s more useful w/o paperless.
I actually use the
document_exporterofpaperless-ngx. I have a small bash scriptbackup-paperless.shthat runs the paperless-ngxdocument_exporterand also makes a database dump usingpg_dump. It sets up the restic backups logic with daily, weekly and monthly backups. I run that bash script using a systemd servicepaperless-backup.service. This service is run daily with the timerpaperless-backup.timer, randomly at 3 am ±30 minutes.resticis smart, so it does only backup if there are changes. The incremental backups are great, in case the database corrupts without me noticing. I’ll share the scripts in case you are interested in how it works:backup-paperless.sh
#!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail COMPOSE_DIR="/home/user/paperless-ngx/" DUMP_DIR="$COMPOSE_DIR/sqldump" EXPORT_DIR="/usr/src/paperless/export" export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="sftp:abc123@abc123.your-storagebox.de:/backup/restic" export RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE="/home/user/.config/restic/password" mkdir -p "$DUMP_DIR" cd "$COMPOSE_DIR" docker compose exec -T webserver document_exporter "$EXPORT_DIR" -p docker compose exec -T db pg_dump -U paperless paperless > "$DUMP_DIR/dump.sql" restic backup "$DUMP_DIR" "$COMPOSE_DIR/export" restic forget \ --keep-daily 7 \ --keep-weekly 4 \ --keep-monthly 6 \ --prune rm -rf "$COMPOSE_DIR/export"/* rm -rf "$DUMP_DIR"/*paperless-backup.service
[Unit] Description=Paperless-ngx Restic Backup Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target docker.service [Service] Type=oneshot User=user WorkingDirectory=/home/user/paperless-ngx ExecStart=/home/user/paperless-ngx/backup-paperless.shpaperless-backup.timer
[Unit] Description=Run paperless backup every 24 hours [Timer] OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:00:00 Persistent=true RandomizedDelaySec=30min [Install] WantedBy=timers.target
How are you handling versioning and deleted files?
It seems like Restic would be a better option? It only backs up changed files and handles versioning, encryption, deduplication, and some fault recovery allready. You wouldn’t need all of the other layers like the export script and float.
