There are various ways you can backup sqlite. One of the ways is to use the sqlite3 command line utility:

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi.db
SQLite version 3.8.6 2014-08-15 11:46:33
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> .backup /tmp/akonadi.db
sqlite> .quit

This will create a backup of akonadi.db in /tmp.

Sqlite also comes with a backup API - see https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html.

As python tends to be my scripting language of choice I was looking for something that I could use in python.

On both my home PC and work laptop I use kontact for my email, calendaring, etc. I didn’t want to use mysql for the underlying database (I don’t particular like it) so decided to use sqlite instead. Generally I have found this to work well, with one or two exceptions.

However, searching for how to automate sqlite backups gives numerous results. The easiest way is to stop whatever is writing to it, in this case akonadi, and then copy the database. Something like: