💾 Backups (daemon)

📌 Description

The backup execution module on the node: creating, restoring and rotating backups of applications. Policies and schedules can be set by the platform (💾 features/backups), but the module also works fully standalone via the CLI (asc backup ...) — no platform account required.

🎯 Scenarios

• asc backup create <app> — back up an app to its configured storages (local by default), or a specific one with --storage <name> (repeatable).
• asc backup restore <app> <backup-id> — restore; the app must be stopped first (destructive: replaces its repository, config and data).
• asc backup list <app> [--storage <name>] — an app's backups on one storage, oldest first.
• asc backup prune <app> --keep <n> [--storage <name>] — delete the oldest backups beyond n by hand (rotation also runs automatically after create, from the app's own keep setting).
• asc backup storage add|list|remove — manage where backups go; asc app settings <app> (category backups) — which of those storages this app backs up to, how many copies to keep, and how often (the schedule runs inside the daemon, see ⏰ scheduler).

🏗️ Technical design

What's backed up

An archive (tar.gz) of the app directory's repository/, config/ and data/ subdirectories — everything except meta.json (regenerated on restore, like a 🧬 clone). asc.backup.yaml at the package repository root excludes paths from the archive:

exclude:
  - data/cache/**
  - repository/vendor

Patterns are relative to the app directory and support * (any run of characters within one path segment), ** (any run, crossing /) and ? (one character); excluding a directory excludes everything under it, like .gitignore. No file is a substitute for application-level consistency (e.g. a database dump) — pre/post backup hooks are a later increment.

Storages (BackupStorage trait, src/daemon/backup/storage.rs)

• local — always available, no setup: a plain directory (<data_dir>/backups, i.e. /var/lib/asc/backups by default). This is the only storage kind that actually transfers anything today.
• s3 / ftp / sftp — configurable via asc backup storage add <name> --type s3|ftp|sftp ... (connection details persist like registry sources — a system list /etc/asc/backup-storages.toml, root-managed and visible to everyone, plus a user list ~/.config/asc/backup-storages.toml; the file is 0600, since it may hold credentials). The provider fields are validated and stored, but push/pull/list/remove are not wired up to a real transfer yet — every operation returns a clear "not implemented" error naming the provider. Use local (optionally pointed at a mounted network share via --type local --dir <path>) until these ship.
• A configured storage's name cannot be local (reserved) and a regular user cannot shadow or remove a system-scoped storage, same rules as 📦 registry sources.

Backup policy (asc app settings → backups)

Stored under the $backup reserved key in config/settings.json, alongside $quota/$start_command (same convention, DMN-017/030): storages (multi-select, toggled by number in the editor), keep (copies to retain per storage — pruned automatically right after each create), schedule (daily@HH:MM, bare HH:MM, or a five-field cron expression min hour day month weekday; validated by the editor). schedule is enforced by the daemon's scheduler (⏰ scheduler, DMN-012): once a minute it evaluates every app's policy against the node's local time and runs the due backups to the policy's storages with the policy's keep rotation — the daemon must be running (asc service install or asc serve). asc backup create <app> without --storage uses the policy's storages, falling back to local alone when the policy is empty.

Restore

Downloads the archive to a local temp file, then replaces the app directory's repository/, config/ and data/ wholesale (removed, then extracted) — the result is exactly the backed-up snapshot, not a merge with whatever was there. The CLI refuses to restore over a running app.

🔗 Related tasks

DMN-009, DMN-012, BE-005 in ROADMAP.md.