Service/backup

Locations

• /backup on Machine/papert: daily filesystem backups for Machine/bender and Machine/sunjammer
• /backup on Machine/bender: daily filesystem backups for all VMs hosted on Machine/papert

Administrative contact

• Bernie Innocenti

wizbackup

• Source code
• Installation instructions

This is the main backup script for all Sugar Labs Machines. It's a minimalist script based on rsync and keeps a history of N days using hard-links. While it's very very simple, wizbackup gets the job done and has the added benefit of not requiring any tools to read or restore a backup. The advantage over similar backup solution is that backups are just plain filesystem snapshots of the source machines; the main disadvantage is poor performance with large files which change often, such as logs or databases (my solution is to exclude these and backup the data using ad-hoc methods, such as SQL dumps).

The `wizbackup-driver` script runs daily on the backup servers from `/etc/cron.daily/wizbackup`. It reads a list of hostnames to backup from `/backup/HOSTS/<machine-group-name>` and an optional list of files exclusions from `/backup/EXCLUDES`, in the same format taken by the `--exclude` flag of rsync.

For each machine in the list, `wizbackup-driver` invokes `wizbackup` with this command-line:

 wizbackup <hostname>:/ <local-backup-dir> --exclude-file /backup/EXCLUDE/ALWAYS --exclude-file /backup/EXCLUDE/<hostname>

Wizbackup uses rsync and ssh to connect to the remote machine. Hence, the backup server must be authorized to connect as root to all backup hosts (e.g.: by storing the identity in `/root/.ssh/authorized_keys`). Wizbackup reads the ssh private key from `/etc/wizbackup/ssh_id`).