fredoliveirafredoliveira/agents/skills/backup-vault/SKILL.md

backup-vault

Skill24 starsChanged 5 months agoMITView on GitHub

Create a dated zip backup of the Obsidian vault and rotate old backups on a grandfather-father-son schedule (14 daily, 5 weekly, 12 monthly, 5 yearly). Use when asked to back up the vault, make a snapshot, or run/prune vault backups.

In this repository7 other files it gives its agents.
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Keep a rolling set of zip snapshots of the vault in ~/Documents/obsidian/backups, pruned to a grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention …
line 10

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Files

SKILL.md

Vault backup & rotation

Purpose

Keep a rolling set of zip snapshots of the vault in ~/Documents/obsidian/backups, pruned to a grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention schedule so the backup folder stays bounded instead of growing forever.

The actual work is done by backup.sh (next to this file) — the logic is deterministic, so run the script rather than reimplementing it by hand.

Retention schedule

A backup is kept if any tier wants it; everything else is deleted.

Tier	Rule
Daily	every backup from the last 14 days
Weekly	newest backup of each of the 5 most recent ISO weeks
Monthly	newest backup of each of the 12 most recent months
Yearly	newest backup of each of the 5 most recent years

Tunable at the top of backup.sh (DAILY_DAYS, WEEKLY_KEEP, MONTHLY_KEEP, YEARLY_KEEP).

What gets backed up

The full vault at ~/Documents/obsidian/umwelt, including .obsidian (themes, plugins, settings) so a restore reproduces the exact setup.
Excluded: .DS_Store, .Trash/, and the backup directory itself.
Archives are named umwelt-YYYY-MM-DD.zip and contain a top-level umwelt/ folder, so restoring is just unzip umwelt-<date>.zip.

Instructions

Run the script:
```
bash ~/.claude/skills/backup-vault/backup.sh
```
- Preview without changing anything: bash .../backup.sh --dry-run
- Override paths if needed: VAULT_DIR=... BACKUP_DIR=... bash .../backup.sh
Report the summary line (how many backups were created / kept / pruned) and the resulting archive size.

The script is idempotent per day: at most one backup is created per calendar date, so it's safe to run repeatedly. Running it both creates today's snapshot and applies retention in one pass.

Notes

This is local only. To replicate offsite, rsync the backups/ directory to the remote target after running the script, e.g. rsync -a --delete ~/Documents/obsidian/backups/ <remote>:obsidian-backups/. Because retention deletes files locally, use --delete so the remote mirrors the same pruned set.
For unattended daily runs, schedule the script (launchd/cron, or the /schedule skill). Nothing in the script needs an interactive session.

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