Service/backup

Locations

/backup on Machine/justice: daily filesystem backups for Machine/freedom
/backup on Machine/freedom: daily filesystem backups for Machine/justice
/backup on Machine/housetree: daily filesystem backups for Machine/sunjammer
/backup on sunjammer.sugarlabs.org: daily database dumps (ldap, mysql and pgsql) for Machine/sunjammer

Administrative contact

* Bernie Innocenti <bernie AT sugarlabs DOT org>

Sysadmins

For non-emergency calls, preferably send email to the administrative contact.

Bernie Innocenti

wizbackup

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 snapashots 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`).

Sunjammer

Machine/sunjammer's filesystem is being backed up on Machine/treehouse using rsync + 7 days of history with hard links.

The MySQL, PostgreSQL and LDAP databases are being backed up daily on backup.sugarlabs.org, encrypted with gpg. TODO: at the moment, we don't have a script to cleanup old backups.

Restoring files from duplicity backups

To restore a backup try something like:

  duplicity restore -t 7D --file-to-restore <source/path/to/restore/from>  scp://sugarbackup@backup.sugarlabs.org/backup/<machine.sugarlabs.org>  </destination/path/to/restore/to>

Replace <> with your values

Example:

  duplicity restore -t 7D --file-to-restore var/lib/mysql/wordpress  scp://sugarbackup@backup.sugarlabs.org/backup/sunjammer.sugarlabs.org  /home/bernie/restore/wordpress