---
title: How to run preparation steps before backups
---
## Preparation and cleanup hooks

If you find yourself performing prepraration tasks before your backup runs, or
cleanup work afterwards, borgmatic hooks may be of interest. Hooks are
shell commands that borgmatic executes for you at various points, and they're
configured in the `hooks` section of your configuration file.

For instance, you can specify `before_backup` hooks to dump a database to file
before backing it up, and specify `after_backup` hooks to delete the temporary
file afterwards. Here's an example:

```yaml
hooks:
    before_backup:
        - dump-a-database /to/file.sql
    after_backup:
        - rm /to/file.sql
```

borgmatic hooks run once per configuration file. `before_backup` hooks run
prior to backups of all repositories. `after_backup` hooks run afterwards, but
not if an error occurs in a previous hook or in the backups themselves.


## Error hooks

borgmatic also runs `on_error` hooks if an error occurs. Here's an example
configuration:

```yaml
hooks:
    on_error:
        - echo "Error while creating a backup."
```


## 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
(`chmod 0700`) on borgmatic configuration files and scripts invoked by hooks.


## Related documentation

 * [Set up backups with borgmatic](../../docs/how-to/set-up-backups.md)
 * [Make per-application backups](../../docs/how-to/make-per-application-backups.md)