52
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
52 points (98.1% liked)
Selfhosted
56174 readers
2022 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I couldn't find a systemd unit or service.
I'm not yet sure about that
How did you install kopia? What system are you on?
It needs to be running, if it is, it will follow the policy. Systemd can start it with the system, but you can also start it some other way. Or you can execute snapshots without it constantly running, via cron/script. It's up to you.
It's a fedora server.
according to kopia's repo, there is no official systemd service https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/2685 and there is none on my system.
in the past week, it did not backup anything. Hence, there is no scheduler built into kopia automagically as described/ hinted in the docs.
I just wrote a systemd service and timer and I'll see if it works. I'm not the best in using systemd. I dislike it, I like cron for it's simplicity.
Even if it works then, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because info about the scheduler is rare and the docs do not even cover the topic.
Sorry, I must've misremembered about systemd. It's how my installs start up, and the unit file is not in the usual location for systemd units I've created myself, so my assumption was it came with Kopia. There is no systemd timer though, and one isn't needed.
Edit: Just confirmed no systemd file came with kopia on my system either, my mistake.
Was Kopia running during that time?
If you run a Kopia command, then it will perform the instructed task, and then exit. It will obviously not do anything after completing whatever command was given, as the process will have exited, leaving no kopia process running on the system. This is for when you use it in cron or your own scripts.
The other way of doing things is to run it in server mode
kopia server start, which will set it running as a background daemon. When running, it allows you to log into the web interface or configure it via cli to do whatever you like. And as long as the process starts along with the host system, that's all there is to it.How the daemon is set up to start, doesn't really matter.
all good. thanks for exchanging our experience :)
kopia wasn't running durin the week. I didn't look into the server configuration since it introduces user handling and that seemed to be overkill for the task but running as daemon would lead to a funcitoning system of course.
this is my kopia.service file in case some else finds it and is interested in it
where $HOME/bin/backup_kopia contains
and my kopia.timer
the backup is working