aarons/mystic-cryptic

This shell utility schedules backups and encrypts them

mystic-cryptic's Issues

Would be nice to install as a brew package / binary

Currently the user needs to run these shell scripts with things like ./backup.sh

An install to /usr/bin or similar would be nice, and a brew package would be pretty sweet once the kinks are worked out.

better error handling

The backup.sh and restore.sh have wonky / inefficient error handling.

For example:

# first zip the directory
zip --quiet --test --recurse-paths -0 $file_name $dir_path

# stop if there was an issue creating the file
if [ ! -f $file_name.zip ]; then
  echo "$file_name.zip does not exist, something went wrong at the zip stage"
  exit 1
fi

Let's say the file exists from a previous run, but zip failed because the output file was already there (this is a contrived example, but similar to something that happened when testing). The code would continue because the file was present, it wouldn't detect that zip actually had an exit 1 error.

Bash scripts must have a better way to detect that a called script exited successfully (exit 0). This would simplify the use of file checks to determine if a command completed successfully.

A simple GUI for scheduling and restoring backups

Passing in the full paths to directories and files is a bit of a pain.

A user interface would be pretty nice to make it clearer and easier to use.

repo / project name

A good name for this repo would be fun.

I'm torn between boring and descriptive or fun and whimsical. Since this is a hobby project, I'm leaning toward whimsy.

• mystic cryptic (current)
• backup crypt (maybe better?)

Other ideas?

better scheduling

I think this needs a better scheduling mechanism than the user's crontab.

Since this is primarily targetted for mac use, it would be nice to have a launchd plist file that could be installed and call this program, and the list of backups could be stored somewhere (maybe the plist file, or a separate file in application support). This would be a more mac-native approach.

Some of the current issues:

• user has to manually remove cronjobs if they don't want to the backup to run
• the script can't update existing cronjobs with new parameters

add 1password export utility

Inspired by this news item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36467400

It seems like a good idea to keep an independently plain-text but encrypted version of a 1password vault around.

Check OSX permission model is setup correctly

This utility depends on cron and find having Full Disk Access in the users OSX settings panel.

This isn't a default setting, so they need to add it manually.

It would be good if setup.sh can detect this issue, then explain how to setup the OSX environment properly.

need a way to allow filtering out files

I tried archiving a code folder, and I forgot that it contains a bunch of LLM models (700gb worth, in fact... Yikes!). I want to archive the code but not the models.

To experiment, I used find to filter out files over 100mb, and it worked well. But it would be ideal to let the user specify what they want to filter out. Need to think of a good interaction for this. The simplest might be allowing the user to specify a size only to filter out. Alternatively, it could be a size and a file-matching pattern like regular expressions. I don't want the backup script to be too complicated though.

Example backup.sh code that filters everything above 100mb:

# first zip the directory
# exclude files over 100mb (+100000k) in size
find "$dir_path" -type f -size +100000k > exclude_list.txt

zip --quiet --test --recurse-paths -0 $file_name $dir_path -x@exclude_list.txt

echo "files over 100mb excluded, here's the list:"
cat exclude_list.txt | while read line; do
  echo "$line"
done
rm exclude_list.txt

script is broken when run from cron

Cron command:
/Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/backup.sh -d "/Users/aaron/Documents/journal" -o "/Users/aaron/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/backups/" >> /Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/logs/log.txt

Log:

/Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/backup.sh: line 73: cd: /Users/aaron/temp: No such file or directory
find: /Users/aaron/Documents/journal: Operation not permitted
/Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/backup.sh: line 82: cat: command not found
/Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/backup.sh: line 85: rm: command not found
/Users/aaron/code/services/mystic-cryptic/backup.sh: line 109: ../.env: No such file or directory

The current PATH variable in crontab:
PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:/usr/bin