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

title
Add preparation and cleanup steps to 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:

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:

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

Hook output

Any output produced by your hooks shows up both at the console and in syslog (when run in a non-interactive console). For more information, read about inspecting your backups.

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
• Make per-application backups
• Inspect your backups