System Backups with rdiff-backup
10 Nov2006
Now that I'm in charge of a rack full of servers, one of the most important considerations is backup strategy. There are a number of open source solutions around, but the one that really caught my eye was rdiff-backup.
The main things that I liked about rdiff-backup that i like are:
- easy to install, zero config
- one liner to run and restore
- backups stored as a normal file tree so you can browse a backed up system, and even mount it if need be
- all diffs etc. stored as gz format, and in a browsable file structure, good for "if all else fails" situations
- runs over ssh so I can just use keychain and ssh keys and cron to automate it (rather than having to learn how to use/configure daemon processes on a machine)
It's not perfect, of course, and I've seen a few bugs show up in the mailing lists to do with backing up OSX and Windows file systems, but that's not something I will ever have to worry about.
I've also seen some issues with ACL (Access Control Lists) permissions which I'm not too worried about as I don't use them anyway.
So all I had to do was install the FreeBSD port for 1.5.3 (which has the added --preserve-numerical-ids switch) which, at the time of this writing, is in /usr/ports/sysutils/rdiff-backup-devel and I was ready to roll.
I put the following in the root crontab:
And then I made this script (paths and passwords removed for brevity and security, line breaks added for readability denoted by "\"):
Backup script to be run from cron
I also created a restore.sh script:
Restore script to recover files from rdiff-backup
Which can be used as follows:
Example usage of the rdiff-backup restore script
This is all backing up to another machine in the same rack, to a single, large IDE drive. I then do a remote backup (just rsync, no incremental backups required) to machines at two remote locations to external USB IDE drives that are encrypted using FreeBSD's GBDE hard drive encryption.
The combination of rdiff-backup, rsync and GBDE have given me a robust, easy to install and configure, fast to restore and above all very cost effective backup solution. No tapes, no NAS, no RAID, no security holes (I think!!).
This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 12:00 am author iain dooley, backups, freebsd, rdiff-backup, system administration, hosting, backup
Subscribe
Building software in the real world - the Working Software blog
We write about our experiences, ideas and interests in business, software and the business of software. We also sometimes write about our own products (in order to promote them).
Recent Posts
- RSS is only dead if we let it die
- Kill your index.php
- 18 Things I Wish I Knew 7 Years Ago
- When does automation become coding
- A list of things you can do to afford Mixergy Premium in 2012
- Thanks Louis now here is my dad
- Your templating engine sucks and everything you have ever written is spaghetti code yes you
- Energy for Opportunity website is now live
- Escaping single and double quotes in XPath queries in PHP
- The reason that outsourcing software is so difficult