Creating a Kloset Store

Last reviewed: 2026-01-29 / Plakar v1.1.0

A Kloset store is Plakar’s immutable storage backend where all your data lives. You can learn more in the Kloset deep dive article.

This tutorial explains how to create a Kloset store on the filesystem.

Option 1: Using a simple path

Run the following command:

plakar at /var/backups create

When you create a store this way, Plakar will prompt you interactively for an encryption passphrase.

To avoid the prompt, you can set the passphrase via the PLAKAR_PASSPHRASEenvironment variable:

export PLAKAR_PASSPHRASE="my-secret-passphrase"

Option 2: Using an alias to refer to a store configuration

Plakar offers a more flexible way to configure stores by defining an alias. This works in two steps:

1. Configure the store once with plakar store.
2. Refer to it later in all Plakar commands using the @name alias.

Using an alias is especially useful for integrations that require parameters (e.g. credentials in S3).

Example: configuring and using a filesystem store

plakar store add mybackups /var/backups passphrase=xxx

To edit the configuration and later update the passphrase of an existing store:

plakar store set mybackups passphrase=yyy

Changing Passphrase

In this example, changing the passphrase only updates the configuration. Accessing existing data created with the old passphrase will fail unless the passphrase is set back to its original value.”

To use the configured store:

plakar at @mybackups create
plakar at @mybackups ls

Default behavior for at <path>

The plakar at <path> parameter is optional. By default, running plakar create creates the Kloset Store in ~/.plakar.