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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

How do you configure the backups with NixOS? Didn't see that explained in the article at all

You would add something like:

    services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ config.services.freshrss.dataDir ];

The point is that you write the general part of the restic config (like the schedule and the S3 endpoint) once, in one place (i.e restic.nix). Then each service-specific part of the restic config, like the line above, lives next to other configs for the freshrss service (i.e. freshrss.nix, not restic.nix). Then a build step generates scripts and systemd units for restic from the merged config. This makes it very easy to remove any service and all traces of it, even when it has “cross-cutting” configs.

Just adding to this since the point might be lost for people new to nix:

You can assign a value to `services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ ... ]` in multiple places throughout your system configuration. When applying the config, all the values will be merged into a single list.

This is important because other standard tasks besides backup (e.g. firewall, monitoring, ...) also require per-service configuration. If every one of these tasks had only a single place where you needed to put a megalist of services (which is basically how `/etc` works on typical Linux distros!), this would quickly scatter the configuration that pertains to FreshRSS over N different files, making it hard to track where everything lives.

Thanks. I’ve edited my comment it so our answers complement each other better.

Aside from services, this pattern is everywhere once you start recognizing it. For example, my Claude Code config in Nix adds CLAUDE.local.md to the global gitignore, my Git config adds aliases to my shell, and my terminal config adds a monospace font to the system fonts.

Not op, but I have a similar setup. I declare systemd services and timers as Nix config to run a restic backup every night.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-26.05/nixos/modu...

What sort of backups are you after? For a system-wide backup, I don't bother. I have the git config for the system in a remote repo. Rebuilding the system is a matter of bootstrapping and then just pointing nix at the config. For my data that is outside the scope of nix, i just have a rclone cron that syncs to/from a remote store.

Given the flake for freshrss doesn't have any sort of explicit "backup" option, my hunch is the author is doing something similar. Point the data dir to a location that gets automatically sync'd elsewhere.

I set up a systemd job to run at shutdown to run Borg. The hardest part wasn't the Nix setup, but getting the right systemd magic words.

https://github.com/Xophmeister/backer-upper/

I believe there are NixOS options to do this periodically -- which is even easier -- but I specifically wanted on-shutdown backups.

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