Storage and backups are hard. It’s something if not managed on a regular basis becomes extremely difficult to untangle. When it comes to managing data and storage, I’ve tried many tools and always felt like there was no declarative and automated way to express how my data moves between various storage mediums and effectively backup to the cloud without fuss.

I’d end up writing these complex systemd files with all the various cli’s and found it very annoying, especially when things went wrong and I only found out 2 or 3 terabytes later in the cloud or when the disk completely filled up. There was no easy way via the cli to manage the various mediums of storage and ended up re-reading the man pages for each program what felt like 100 times over.

In comes my new tool I’m happy to announce: T.A.R.D.I.S. It’s a cli tool to declarativly define and manage disks, mounts, snapshots, syncs, backups, and pools in TOML. It’s similar to borgmatic but beyond just managing and automating backups. It combines rclone, mergerfs, borg, and btrfs into a unified tool that anyone can use to manage storage between storage mediums and the cloud.

The project started off as me just wanting to use wasabi cloud storage as a extended storage solution. I have a small computer that can’t fit those big honkin 3.5" drives into my chasis and I wanted to store more than 5TB of data. I absolutely could have just built a nass (and prob should have) but this sounded like a fun project and with my life goal to move to europe in the next few years, and having to haul a nass just didn’t seem like the solution I wanted.