Creating a Kloset Store

A Kloset store is Plakar’s immutable storage backend for backup data. This guide covers filesystem-based store creation. You can learn more in the Kloset deep dive article.

Before you can run any backup, you’ll need to create a Kloset store to hold the data. It can be hosted anywhere that Plakar has an integration with a storage connector. For example, a local filesystem path, a remote S3 bucket, another server via SFTP, or other supported backends.

$ plakar at /var/backups create

Plakar prompts for an encryption passphrase. To avoid the prompt, set:

$ export PLAKAR_PASSPHRASE="my-secret-passphrase"
$ plakar at /var/backups create

Plakar encrypts the store by default. A few flags modify this behaviour:

• -keyfile <path>: reads the passphrase from a file, taking precedence over the environment variable. Useful when a file-based secret is preferred over an environment variable for non-interactive services.
• -plaintext: disables encryption entirely (not recommended for production).
• -weak-passphrase: allows a weak passphrase to be accepted (avoid in production).

Without specifying a path, plakar create uses ~/.plakar:

$ plakar create

Configure a store once, then reference it by alias in all subsequent commands:

$ plakar store add mybackups /var/backups passphrase=xxx

Use the configured store:

$ plakar at @mybackups create
$ plakar at @mybackups ls

$ plakar store set mybackups passphrase=yyy

Use aliases for:

• Stores requiring credentials (S3, cloud storage)
• Multiple stores with different configurations
• Avoiding repetitive path specifications

In a small test environment, the repository size can exceed the size of the saved data. For example, 8.9 MB for the repository against 3 MB of source data. This is because Plakar has a fixed structural overhead of roughly 5–6 MB (index, state, and packfile structures) that dominates when the data volume is small. The gains from deduplication and compression only become apparent at scale, on real repetitive data with a history of multiple snapshots. A toy folder is not a representative benchmark.