SSH config location

[Glideh]

For people like me that mostly need SFTP repos, it's cool to be able to configure the SSH config in one file, so we just need to set the sftp:host:target repo URI at creation.

Example

• Create a ssh directory

mkdir ./ssh

• Create the ssh/config file

Host host
    Hostname truc.chouette.fr
    Port 12345
    User me

• Generate the known_hosts

ssh-keyscan -H -p 12345 truc.chouette.fr > ./ssh/known_hosts

• Create a key

ssh-keygen -f ./ssh/id_rsa

• Set the expected permissions

chmod 700 ./ssh
chmod 600 ./ssh/*
sudo chown -R root:root ./ssh/

• Mount the directory at the default location

compose.yml

services:
  backrest:
#...
    volumes:
#...
      - ./ssh:/root/.ssh

• Now we can create a repo with just sftp:host:target as URI

Maybe this would deserve a README section, what do you think ?

[garethgeorge]

Definitely worth a README section or perhaps a cookbook at https://garethgeorge.github.io/backrest/cookbooks/

Writing up more docs is solidly on my todo list -- any contributions here are also very welcome! SSH configuration is perhaps one of the most asked about issues and definitely deserves some working examples.

[Glideh]

I can do I PR if needed

[garethgeorge]

Went ahead and wrote this up in https://garethgeorge.github.io/backrest/cookbooks/ssh-remote , thanks again for contributing the initial tips / guide of what worked for you.

[Stephane-30]

Hi @garethgeorge . Thank you for the tutorial. It was exactly what I was looking for to be able to backup some directories from my little server to my NAS via sftp. However, it took me two hours to work out that I have to change ownership of ssh dir to root:root. I finally found the hint in this tread. Maybe you want to add that to your tutorial under point 5. :-)

[raphpa]

This can also be done with the restic additional sftp args like:

-o sftp.args="-o UserKnownHostsFile=/config/known_hosts -i /config/id_ed25519"

Also the port is not recognized if you do not use double slashes after sftp: (as recommended in the documentation). For Hetzner storage boxes for example it would be sftp://u123456-sub123@u123456.your-storagebox.de:23//home

[garethgeorge]

Thanks for calling this out -- it's clear that there's a lot of inconsistent documentation re: backrest and sftp setup, it's a major painpoint. I've filed #620 to track writing up a guide