# gdsnap: i automated my backups with inotify and google drive

i'm not the collector type: i don't collect photos or movies or that sort of things. i only have a handful of megabytes of data i care about that i don't really want to upload to publicly readable places: my journals, my todo lists, configs, some half-started mini projects. i care about this data but i always worry that my machine will break and i'll lose some of this data. so i had a "backup" script that i often ran. it zipped up the relevant files, encrypted the package, and scp'd it to my very old university account.

i was always a bit annoyed that i had to run the backup script manually. and it always created a full snapshot. to reduce space wastage, i named the file after the date and omitted time. so there was at most one backup for every day. if i ran the script multiple times in a single day then each backup overwrote that day's backup. but even with this system i had to manually delete old snapshots every 2-3 months or so. i was looking for something better, that doesn't require maintenance.

at work we have a nice (but proprietary) fuse filesystem that pretty much saved every write to a central database. but then you could look at your tree at any given moment: e.g. i deleted accidentally a file? i can go back to 10 minutes ago and restore it from there. or i want to look at the diff since yesterday? easy peasy! i grew fond of this and wished that i could have this at home too in some form.

the interface wasn't really nice though: in the root directory there was a .snapshot directory and under it you could cd into a timestamp, a version, or something like .snapshot/minutes.ago/5.

anyway, i was looking at various opensource backup systems and interestingly none had such a nice diffing feature. so i decided to build my own backup system that can do time based diffing too!

# solution

i have to admit: i spent more than a year thinking about this until i found the right approach. but the thinking time was worth it because i now found a system that is pretty simple and works well for my usecase:

• create a backup daemon
• watch the filesystem of interest for changes via inotify
• wake up every 20 minutes and upload the changed files to google drive

and that's it. here's the trick: google drive automatically saves your last 100 revisions for 30 days. that means i have automatic history and i don't have to manage it! and since google drive is free, this backup solution is entirely free and available for anyone.

i called my tool "gdsnap" as in "google drive snapshotter".

now i just freely edit my files as i want. if i want to see what changed in my todo file since yesterday, i can run this:

  gdsnap -t=24h diff todo

i could run "gdsnap -t=24h diff" and it will tell me the diffs from all files since yesterday. it's reasonably fast even on my first generation armv6 rasperry pi! i don't have a lot of files though; my home dir has about 4k files only.

i wrote the whole thing in go without any dependencies other than its standard library. it's about 1300 lines of code. i was again impressed with go: it's incredibly easy to code up anything in it. i know that this would have been utter pain to implement in a dependency-free c/c++.

# help

here's an excerpt of the help screen of the tool to see what's it capable of:

  $ gdsnap help
  gdsnap: google drive snapshotter
  usage: gdsnap [global flags...] subcommand [args...]

  periodically snapshots the changed files of a directory to gdrive as a backup.
  to use: set up the right -dir and -gdir flags (ideally in a config file),
  then use the auth subcommand to authorize,
  and then run the watch command as a daemon to back up data continuosly.
  if you want to restore, use the restore subcommand.
  you can alter the -dir flag for restore in case you want to restore files somewhere else.

  subcommands:
    auth: authorize a gdrive account for gdsnap.
    cat: prints a file from the archive.
    diff: diff the whole tree or specific files. the diff is between gdrive and the files on disk.
    help: print help about a subcommand.
    list: list gdrive metadata.
    quota: print gdrive quota usage and limit.
    restore: restores files from the backup (destructive operation!).
    save: snapshot a specific file.
    watch: watch target directory for changes and back them up.

  [more description and help snipped]

# nice things

• the files are compressed and encrypted before uploading them to gdrive. gdrive is notorious about scanning your files and then deciding whether you can access them or not. this affects completely innocent files too, see some horror stories at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30061041. having everything encrypted avoids this trap in a simple manner.

• the backup daemon logs all the files it uploads. so you can track what sort of filesystem traffic exists on your machine and perhaps kill some of it to reduce the tear and wear on your ssd.

• the daemon has some special flags to alert you on special conditions. e.g. it can start a notification binary when an upload failed or when the remaining free space on gdrive is low.

• it correctly tracks the file permissions, symlinks, deleted files. it uses the "mime type" gdrive metadata field to store some of this metadata. e.g. a file that is accessible only to you has a mime type of "gdsnap/data600". this is a pretty neat trick, i'm proud of myself for finding this hack! the filename is in the gdrive file's name as i didn't feel it's important to encrypt this.

• gdsnap uses the file's modified time to determine whether a file needs to be uploaded. it also skips uploading if the md5sum didn't change since gdrive tracks md5sum: ideal when some git operations change the timestamps but not the contents.

• gdsnap has only access to the files it uploads. it won't be able to access other files from the gdrive. the oauth screen during the initialization should make this clear. gdsnap doesn't talk to anything else than the gdrive account it's configured with. though this property can be confirmed only by a careful review of the code.

# summary

if interested, here's the source code from the time of writing this blog post: https://github.com/ypsu/cfg/blob/611e906/utils/gdsnap.go. it's all in one single file. it might have some bugs but so far it worked well for me. the help screen should explain how to set up your personal google drive for gdsnap and how to set up gdsnap's config files.

and i'm now happy that i have a nice automatic backup along with diffs. \o/

published on 2022-02-13

to the frontpage