Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: Vault backup & rotation

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.

UncategorizedID: fredoliveira/obsidian-skills/backup-vault

Repository

fredoliveira/obsidian-skills
fredoliveiraLicense: MIT
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Install this agent skill to your local

pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/fredoliveira/agents/tree/HEAD/skills/backup-vault

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skills/backup-vault/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
backup-vault
Description
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.

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

  1. 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
  2. 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.