Creating a Kloset Store

A Kloset store is Plakar’s immutable storage backend for backup data. This guide covers filesystem-based store creation. You can learn more in the Kloset deep dive article

Before you can run any backup, you’ll need to create a Kloset store to store the data. It can be hosted anywhere that Plakar has an integration with a storage connector for e.g a local filesystem path, a remote S3 bucket, another server via SFTP, or other supported backends.

$ plakar at /var/backups create

Plakar prompts for an encryption passphrase. To avoid the prompt, set:

$ export PLAKAR_PASSPHRASE="my-secret-passphrase"
$ plakar at /var/backups create

Configure store once, reference by alias in all commands:

$ plakar store add mybackups /var/backups passphrase=xxx

Use the configured store:

$ plakar at @mybackups create
$ plakar at @mybackups ls

When using a config alias, you can override the root path of the store without changing the stored configuration. This is useful when the alias points to a base location and you want to target a subdirectory or an entirely different path for a specific operation.

Given an alias foobar configured as sftp://localhost/tmp:

# Use the configured root as-is
$ plakar at @foobar

# Append a relative subdirectory: resolves to sftp://localhost/tmp/etc
$ plakar at @foobar:etc

# Override with an absolute path: resolves to sftp://localhost/etc
$ plakar at @foobar:/etc

The same override syntax applies when specifying a backup source. Given an alias foobar configured as sftp://localhost/etc:

# Use the configured source root
$ plakar backup @foobar

# Append a relative path: resolves to sftp://localhost/etc/uucp
$ plakar backup @foobar:uucp

# Override with an absolute path: resolves to sftp://localhost/etc/uucp
$ plakar backup @foobar:/etc/uucp

You can back up more than one directory in a single snapshot by passing multiple paths to plakar backup:

$ plakar backup /etc /home

$ plakar store set mybackups passphrase=yyy

Without specifying a path, plakar create uses ~/.plakar:

$ plakar create

Use aliases for:

• Stores requiring credentials (S3, cloud storage)
• Multiple stores with different configurations
• Avoiding repetitive path specifications