Backup dotfiles with lockbook on macos

Lockbook is a blazingly fast note taking application written in rust. We can store compressed and encrypted text files in lockbook’s cloud on the free tier. Lockbook’s CLI supports automatic file syncronization similar to Google Drive.

In this post, I’ll show how I back up my nvchad custom config (docs). This symlink strategy can be used to backup any configs or other text data automatically.

Setting up the `lockbook` CLI

First install lockbook version >= 0.9.0

brew tap lockbook/lockbook && brew install lockbook

Or build from source.
Guide for tab completions on bash or zsh.

lockbook
account      -- account management commands
completions  -- generate completions for a given shell
copy         -- import files from your file system into lockbook
debug        -- investigative commands
delete       -- delete a file
edit         -- edit a document
export       -- export a lockbook file to your file system
fs           -- use your lockbook files with your local filesystem by mounting an NFS drive to /tmp/lockbook
list         -- list files and file information
move         -- move a file to a new parent
new          -- create a new file at the given path or do nothing if it exists
rename       -- rename a file
share        -- sharing related commands
sync         -- sync your local changes back to lockbook servers

The `lockbook fs` command

Automatically syncs your entire lockbook with a localhost NFS drive in /tmp/lockbook

lockbook fs

Back up our dotfiles

Please note, this guide will replace your existing directory with a symlink. It’s highly recommended to backup the existing directory before proceeding to avoid losing configurations.

cp -r ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom_backup

Copy dotfiles to `/tmp/lockbook`

mkdir /tmp/lockbook/dotfiles
cp -r ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom/ /tmp/lockbook/dotfiles/nvchad-config

Create the symlink

ln -s /tmp/lockbook/dotfiles/nvchad-config ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom

Verify the symlink

ls -l ~/.config/nvim/lua

Look for the custom entry in the output. It should indicate that it is a symlink (l at the beginning of the permissions string) and point to your target directory /tmp/lockbook/dotfiles/nvchad-config.