In the last post I was arguing about wrong and empty backups.

Until a few days ago I was very happy about my Raspberry setup and the fact I spent time on backups and monitoring at the beginning of this adventure. Then I realized: “I said I had backups but last time it was not true. I fixed that but I never tried to restore them in another machine”. And I was scared I could lost my data in every moment.

So I decided to try to restore the backup in my backblaze bucket into my personal laptop. When I wrote the other post I did restore it but on the Raspberry.

The first I tried was to install autorestic but for some reasons similar to the ones here I could not do it. I really did not want to fight again and I remember they also offered a Docker image and I went with it.

At this point I realized that my backups were at very high risk: I did not save the key nor the autorestic.yml but I only had the access key for the bucket. But as they state in their docs, without the key that data is useless since the encryption is done in the server:

warning about data loss

So the first thing I did was to ssh to the Raspberry and save the autorestic.yml into my Bitwarden Vault.

Then I created a file called autorestic.yml on my personal laptop and then executed:

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/data cupcakearmy/autorestic autorestic restore -l home -c /data/autorestic.yml --to /data/restore

This succesfully executed and I got my restore folder. I tried to cd but I got access denied. Oh fuck. A quick ls -l showed me that root owned that folder so I executed (thanks Stackoverflow that I can always forget basic commands): sudo chmod a+rwx restore and tried again: I could access it and everything was there. Backup are safe.