borgmatic/docs/how-to/add-preparation-and-cleanup-steps-to-backups.md

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title: How to add preparation and cleanup steps to backups eleventyNavigation: key: 🧹 Add preparation and cleanup steps parent: How-to guides

order: 10

If you find yourself performing preparation tasks before your backup runs or doing cleanup work afterwards, borgmatic command hooks may be of interest. These are custom shell commands you can configure borgmatic to execute at various points as it runs.

(But if you're looking to backup a database, it's probably easier to use the database backup feature instead.)

New in version 2.0.0 Command hooks are now configured via a list of commands: in your borgmatic configuration file. For example:

commands:
    - before: action
      when: [create]
      run:
          - echo "Before create!"
    - after: action
      when:
          - create
          - prune
      run:
          - echo "After create or prune!"
    - after: error
      run:
          - echo "Something went wrong!"

If you're coming from an older version of borgmatic, there is tooling to help you upgrade your configuration to this new command hook format.

Note that if a run: command contains a special YAML character such as a colon, you may need to quote the entire string (or use a multiline string) to avoid an error:

commands:
    - before: action
      when: [create]
      run:
          - "echo Backup: start"

By default, an after command hook runs even if an error occurs in the corresponding before hook or between those two hooks. This allows you to perform cleanup steps that correspond to before preparation commands—even when something goes wrong. You may notice that this is a departure from the way that the deprecated after_* hooks worked in borgmatic prior to version 2.0.0.

New in version 2.0.3 You can customize this behavior with the states option. For instance, here's an example of an after hook that only triggers on success and not on error:

commands:
    - after: action
      when: [create]
      states: [finish]
      run:
          - echo "After successful create!"

See the command hooks documentation for additional details about how to configure command hooks.

Deprecated command hooks

Prior to version 2.0.0 The command hooks worked a little differently. In these older versions of borgmatic, you can specify before_backup hooks to perform preparation steps before running backups and specify after_backup hooks to perform cleanup steps afterwards. These deprecated command hooks still work in version 2.0.0+, although see below about a few semantic differences starting in that version.

Here's an example of these deprecated hooks:

before_backup:
    - mount /some/filesystem
after_backup:
    - umount /some/filesystem

If your command contains a special YAML character such as a colon, you may need to quote the entire string (or use a multiline string) to avoid an error:

before_backup:
    - "echo Backup: start"

There are additional hooks that run before/after other actions as well. For instance, before_prune runs before a prune action for a repository, while after_prune runs after it.

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

New in version 2.0.0 An after_* command hook runs even if an error occurs in the corresponding before_* hook or between those two hooks. This allows you to perform cleanup steps that correspond to before_* preparation commands—even when something goes wrong.

New in version 2.0.0 When command hooks run, they respect the working_directory option if it is configured, meaning that the hook commands are run in that directory.

New in version 1.7.0 The before_actions and after_actions hooks run before/after all the actions (like create, prune, etc.) for each repository. These hooks are a good place to run per-repository steps like mounting/unmounting a remote filesystem.

New in version 1.6.0 The before_backup and after_backup hooks each run once per repository in a configuration file. before_backup hooks runs right before the create action for a particular repository, and after_backup hooks run afterwards, but not if an error occurs in a previous hook or in the backups themselves. (Prior to borgmatic 1.6.0, these hooks instead ran once per configuration file rather than once per repository.)

You can also use before_everything and after_everything hooks to perform global setup or cleanup:

before_everything:
    - set-up-stuff-globally

after_everything:
    - clean-up-stuff-globally

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

before_everything hooks collected from all borgmatic configuration files run once before all configuration files (prior to all actions), but only if there is a create action. An error encountered during a before_everything hook causes borgmatic to exit without creating backups.

after_everything hooks run once after all configuration files and actions, but only if there is a create action. It runs even if an error occurs during a backup or a backup hook, but not if an error occurs during a before_everything hook.

on_error hooks run when an error occurs, but only if there is a create, prune, compact, or check action. For instance, borgmatic can run configurable shell commands to fire off custom error notifications or take other actions, so you can get alerted as soon as something goes wrong. Here's a not-so-useful example:

on_error:
    - echo "Error while creating a backup or running a backup hook."

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put this option in the hooks: section of your configuration.

The on_error hook supports interpolating particular runtime variables into the hook command. Here's an example that assumes you provide a separate shell script to handle the alerting:

on_error:
    - send-text-message.sh

borgmatic does not run on_error hooks if an error occurs within a before_everything or after_everything hook.

Hook output

Any output produced by your hooks shows up both at the console and in syslog (when enabled). For more information, see the logging documentation.

Security

An important security note about hooks: borgmatic executes all hook commands with the user permissions of borgmatic itself. So to prevent potential shell injection or privilege escalation, do not forget to set secure permissions on borgmatic configuration files (chmod 0600) and scripts (chmod 0700) invoked by hooks.